Nasty Birds

Before you read the following, you have to promise not to tell anyone involved with PETA that I have the following train of thought.  And if you are actually part of PETA, I suggest you go find some other story to read.  I don’t need the “but that is animal cruelty” responses attached to this story.  If you choose to respond in that fashion anyway, please know that your words will not save even one goose and have no way of changing my feelings in the slightest.

I don’t like geese.  I don’t like anything about them.  You know the ones–those honking, noisy, dirty, hissing, road blocking, vile birds.  Do you have them passing through your neighborhood?  They’re nasty!  I’m declaring right here that if they were to go extinct tomorrow, the world would miss nothing.  If they had some sort of link to curing diseases it would be a shame, but I don’t think you’ll ever read a story of how the goose was used to develop the cure for cancer or botulism.  I don’t even know exactly what you go through with botulism, but if I had it I’m positive that I would not go running to a goose for the cure.

I lived in an apartment about three addresses ago.  The buildings were situated around a manmade lake and there was a walking trail that my wife and I would go strolling along hand in hand.  It was a beautiful picture, as you can imagine.  Beautiful that is, until the geese arrived.  After only a couple hours of them setting up camp, the path was effectively unusable.  Goose crap everywhere.  Everywhere you look you see little green logs of turds.  Holding hands was now completely out of the question.  At this point it was single-file only, keep your eyes downward, and try to find enough space to place your next step without squashing a green log or two.  A simple walk with my wife is what I was looking for, not a game of “walking poop puzzle”.  There aren’t too many winners in that game.

The first time they came to our lake, I remember thinking that the apartment management must have aerated the grass surrounding the pond.  Way to go apartment management–you do care about how our landscaping looks.  Not so much.  The management got a free fertilizer job–a nice thorough job at that.  Good job you slimy group of birds.  Why don’t you do me a favor?  Make your “V”, fly away from here, and don’t come back.

Even the plural form of the word goose kind of bugs me.  Why do we need to swap out the O’s for E’s?  Goose goes to geese.  Why?  The word “gooses” isn’t hard to pronounce.  Say it out loud–try it?  See, it’s no problem.  It’s easy.  How arrogant is that group of birds that they need a special word for “more than one” of them?  Screw you gooses!

Another thing that completely bugs me is how they walk.  Walk!  They walk slowly from one side of the road to the other.  If I’m not mistaken, they do have wings and the ability to fly.  We have all seen them fly, but they insist upon walking ever-so slowly across our streets blocking up traffic.  It irks me that people actually stop for these pompous birds.

“I could use my wings to cross the street, but these stupid humans driving in their very large vehicles will, in fact, stop for me.  I’m a goose.  I own the road.”

You’ve been there.  You’ve done it.  You’ve stopped and waited for the group to pass by.  Consider this: You are perpetuating the problem.  Yeah you!  You goose stopper.  You are training these birds to continue walking across the streets.

I’ll tell you what, I don’t stop any more.  When I’m not trapped behind the goose-stopping drivers, when I’m fortunate enough to be the first car to the pompous goose crossing event, I keep going.  I don’t stop.  You know how many gooses (yeah gooses, not geese) that I have actually run over?  Care to guess?  None!  Because just before I get the chance to flatten that last green log out of its slow-walking existence, it decides that its wings can be used to save its own life.  They actually will fly away when targeted with 2000 pounds of vehicle.  Strange how that works.

I think the best time to not stop for them is when they have that cute little line up of baby birds trailing along.  Let us all train them to fly over our roads when they are young.  This could be a young goose’s thought pattern:  “Mom said that the cars will stop for us as we cross.  So don’t worry about that car coming directly as us.  Oh no, he ain’t stopping!  Hey, did you see mom have to fly out of the way?  Crap, maybe we should learn to fly or simply stay off the roads.  And speaking of crap, have you noticed how the older geese crank out turds bigger than us?”

So forget the mexican border issues.  I think we need to move our resources to the Canadian border.  We should quadruple the number of hunters on the border and give them the green light to take out every single canadian goose that tries to migrate to the United States.  No more slow street crossings and decorated walking paths.  No more.

buy my book!

PS – Upon receiving a nasty-gram months later, I wrote this.