Why Animals Eat Their Young

They are out there. There’s little we can do about it. We not only protect them but it appears we are proliferating their very being.

My next statement will appear extremely cruel to 99.999% of Americans. If you don’t want to be offended get off this page and don’t leave stupid comments in the comment section….thank you.

The other day I went to Home Depot to buy some spray paint in order to paint an antique iron bed frame. I picked out two cans and headed for the Self Check-out up front. I scanned the first can and that act set off a bunch of bells, whistles and sirens. On the screen it read, “Please show your driver’s license to the cashier now!”

WHAT????? Even with all the noise and commotion, there was no customer service representative making any attempt to come to my rescue. So, I did what any red-blooded asshole – that is anyone who is getting so fed up with government orchestrating every damned move I make – would do and shouted very loudly, “Why do I have to show somebody my driver’s license?”

With that a young man said, “I’ll help you with that sir,” and he walked over to his computer screen and cleared the mess on mine. He said, “There you go, sir. You can continue now.”

But nobody has answered my question: “Why do I need to show someone my driver’s license?”

To the customer service representative the answer was simple. To me it was mind blowing. He said, “You have to be 18 to buy this kind of paint.”

“WHAT????? Why?”

“Because kids are buying it to ‘sniff’ and get high,” was his reply.

Without thinking I said, “Let them buy the stuff. Why do we continue to protect these kinds of people?”

I shocked the hell out of this guy.

So, what happens is these paint-sniffing kids, probably offspring of dope-taking adults, become adults and write letters to the editors of newspapers comparing bear hunting to slavery. Yup!

In a letter to the editor of a Maine newspaper, a woman writes, “I have no sympathy for anyone whose business plan is based on cruelty, any more than I feel sorry for the plantation owners who had to give up their slaves…”

You see this person also thinks bears are “sentient” beings, that is, “able to perceive or feel things,” like humans. I used to think that people who thought this way just wanted to make animals become like humans so they could have at least one friend. Over the years I’ve come to learn what is really going on is that some humans want to become like bears (animals) so that they can actually “perceive” something.

But on a somewhat related note, many of the same people who think bears are smarter than they are, and are more perceptive, have continued to perpetuate a pulled-out-of-the-hat concoction that Maine bear hunters litter the forests with “7-million pounds” of junk food.

First it’s not really littering because all the animals clean it up. Second, 7-million pounds?

In another letter to the editor I was reading this morning, a guy wanted to know how much of an outcry there would be if someone proposed a landfill into which just the 7-million pounds of “jelly donuts” could be dumped. This got me to thinking.

I know a little bit about bear baiting, but I’m not an outfitter, nor have I ever personally baited bear or sat over a bait pile. I did stay at a Holiday Inn once and while there I talked with some bear hunters. Not all bear hunters spend thousands of dollars to buy their bait at full retail value. Some get it at reduced prices, while others get it free.

If bear hunters didn’t use this 7-million pounds of junk food, what would become of it? Would it feed the hungry? I don’t think so. Magically disappear? Doubt it. Be shipped down to the governor of New Jersey’s house? Wrong again. I guess it would end up in the same place all other wasted stuff goes….the landfill.

Just suppose that there was 7-million pounds of bait put out each year from about one month of baiting, times 12 months = 84-million pounds a year. Just to be clear, that’s 168 tons of waste in landfills. Over a ten-year period of time, Maine’s landfills are sneaking up on 2000 tons of food waste.

What about New Hampshire, Vermont, New York and every other state in the Union. What happens to their wasted junk food. If each state had the equivalent amount of wasted junk food as Maine, why golly, there would be 10,000 tons (20 million pounds) of wasted potential bear bait a year.

We can look at this one of two ways: Either there’s an awful lot of wasted food in landfills in this country or maybe there really isn’t quite 7 million pounds of junk food dumped in Maine forests over a one month period of time.

Now, before you go getting your undies in a wad, I’m almost as “sentient” as that bear, and I realize that probably some, I don’t know how much, of the junk food used for bear bait is produced specifically for the bear baiting business. If that is true, then that’s great because somebody has a job that will pay for all the entitlements those protected, paint-sniffing kids will be needing.

We know from 40 years of Maine black bear studies, that any bait used by bear hunters has absolutely none of the side effects claimed by the paint sniffers. Therefore, people have jobs, and that includes manufacturing a bit of “stuff” for bear bait. The bear hunting event keeps a lot of people working, AND it provides for a very healthy black bear population.

And I now all of this because I DON’T SNIFF PAINT!