Wild Turkeys in the North Ward

By Alan Caruba

Every so often you will hear the usual weeping and wailing about how we terrible humans have displaced Mother Nature’s wild creatures by selfishly building houses and other structures in “their” habitat. For years it seemed the only thing the mainstream media could write about was “urban sprawl.”

The Sunday edition of my local daily carried a story about wild turkeys showing up in the North Ward which just happens to be part of Newark, New Jersey! It doesn’t get more “urban” than Newark.

Newark is not famous for its wild turkey population, but the fact is that sightings of wild turkeys have been quite common throughout northern New Jersey for many years. The television series, “The Sopranos”, made various locations around this part of the state famous and in one episode, Tony actually sighted a black bear in his suburban back yard.

I recall a personal encounter with a turkey in my back yard before I moved to the relative safety of an apartment complex one town over. They come equipped with a bad attitude which I suppose for New Jersey is not surprising especially if you’re trespassing. I swiftly concluded that, short of a shotgun, I was better off inside the house until it left.

As Pat Scheuer, director of the wildlife center Lorrimer Sanctuary in northern Bergen County noted, “It’s pretty normal.” Bouncing back from having been over-hunted about two decades or more ago, the turkeys are everywhere. And it’s not just New Jersey.

The turkeys have made a nuisance of themselves in Jackson, Michigan and Tilburn, California, to name just two places where they have been reported for destroying landscaping and scratching automobiles.

Another animal-related activity was also reported in the local daily. It was the culling of the state’s deer population by bow hunters. This culling process is now so commonplace that PETA and other animal rights folks have stopped showing up to protest. Given a choice of some demented PETA person in their yards or a bunch of deer, most residents would take the PETA nutcase because they won’t eat the expensive shrubbery.

So, let’s see, wild turkeys, deer, and black bears. When you add in the Canada geese that are everywhere despoiling public parks and other large stretches of greenery, New Jersey is a veritable zoo.

One hardly bothers to mention the vast population of raccoons that share our suburbs because of the multi-course dinners that are available in garbage cans. Opossum and battalions of squirrels complete the wildlife. The songbirds, of course, are welcome, but the rest of these critters keep an army of animal control officers on the move when not corralling stray dogs and cats.

The next time someone says we are depriving such creatures of their habitat, take them on a tour of beautiful New Jersey, the most densely populated (by humans) State in the Union. A drive up Route 78 with the dead deer lying by the roadside should convince them that there are likely too many deer in the vicinity.

If you happen to be in the North Ward of Newark, keep an eye out for those wild turkeys.

A hat tip to Sam Delgado who took the photo in the North Ward.

The PETA Thanksgiving Kill-Joys

By Alan Caruba

The folks at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, otherwise known as PETA, are back again trying to take the joy out of Thanksgiving and by that I mean trying to convince people that eating turkey is not only bad for you, but a gross violation of turkey rights.

They have offered their “Top Ten Reasons Not to Eat Turkeys” among which is the claim that turkeys “are smart animals with personality and character”, but this does not explain why not one single turkey has ever written a sonnet, composed an opera, or been elected to Congress—despite the fact that many of its members are frequently referred to as turkeys.

PETA goes on to claim that “turkey flesh is brimming with fat” and that unidentified “experts are warning that a virulent new strain of bird flu could spread to human beings and kill millions of Americans.” That’s right, we will either put on weight on Thanksgiving Day or we will die.

This kind of scare campaign is precisely why I founded The National Anxiety Center in 1990 as a clearinghouse for information about this and the countless other scare campaigns with which Americans are assailed on a daily basis.

The worst part of these campaigns is the way they too often become the law of the land. For example, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that points to the fact that we are into a global cooling cycle, but that is not likely to keep the Obama administration from trying to impose cap-and-trade restrictions on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. The costs of such restrictions would finish off what’s left of our tattered economy.

PETA is utterly shameless in its quest to get Americans to give up eating meat, using or wearing anything made of leather, wearing fur of any kind, drinking milk, eating cheese or eggs, hunting, fishing, owning pets, going to the circus or rodeo, and generally enjoying life for any reason.

Meanwhile, according to government documents, PETA employees have killed more than 19,200 dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens since 1998. The Center for Consumer Freedom keeps a close eye on PETA for the rest of us and what they reveal is, well, very revealing.

PETA is against all forms of medical research that requires the use of test animals even if it will find a cure for AIDS, cancer or any other disease or condition.

PETA has given tens of thousands of dollars to convicted arsonists and other violent criminals, some of whom the FBI identifies as “domestic terrorists.” These include the North American Earth Liberation Front.

PETA regularly targets children with their anti-milk and anti-meat propaganda. One piece of PETA literature tells them “Your Mommy Kills Animals!”

This is the kind of shameless and vile behavior that PETA engages in all the time.

It is, however, just one part of a far greater mosaic of “warnings” being slapped on everything we eat or use (a) to avoid litigation and (b) to influence our purchasing decisions. Do we really need caloric information when we visit a restaurant? Must we be forced to forego smoking by the imposition of appalling high taxes which go to state governments that either wastes the money or gives it to someone else?

Isn’t anyone angry about having to pay for an ethanol additive to every gallon of gasoline when it reduces its mileage while increasing not only its price, but the price of everything in the local supermarket by driving up the cost of corn and soybeans that are fed to the livestock whose meat we enjoy?

When the family gathers around the dinner table on Thanksgiving Day, whether the main course is turkey or a ham, give a thought to the many farmers and ranchers who have produced such an abundance of safe, delicious food.

The Greens Hate Mankind

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has followed the environmental movement for as long as I have knows that, at its core, there is a profound hatred for the human race.

Combine this with an equally intense desire to control every aspect of everyone's lives on planet Earth and you have a very dangerous movement, funded by foundations whose wealth was built by industrialists who must be spinning in their graves.

The movement is home to a wide variety of “intellectuals” whose vanity is their excuse for some of the most immoral and inhumane recommendations made daily. Their followers are largely gullible people with an extraordinary capacity to ignore reality.

Excellent examples of Green insanity are found in a December 19th article in the Herald Sun, Melbourne, Australia, by Andrew Bolt. He collected some “original tips of many experts on how to slash the gases they say are killing the planet.”

Among the twenty citations was Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson’s advice that the Earth’s population has to be reduced “to fewer than one billion.” Presumably, given this group’s opposition to pesticides, one easy way is to keep the ban on DDT that has accounted for the needless deaths of millions from malaria.

Bolt took note of Prof. Barry Walters of the University of Western Australia who expressed the opinion that families with more than two children should be charged a carbon tax "on their little gas emitters." Going further, Toni Vernelli of PETA, the animal rights group, says she took steps to avoid having a child because she felt “It would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world.” Nor is she alone. Dr. John Reid, a former Swinburne University academic recommending putting “something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system, and would make a substantial proportion of the population unfertile.”

If any of this reminds you of the Nazi view that some life was “unworthy of life” and, acting on this belief, set up death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, unionists, and anyone who disagreed with them for any reason. They had begun by killing the mentally ill and retarded among them until ordinary Germans protested.

Little wonder Pope Benedict XVI recently warned against the scare-mongering behind global warming. He said that it is vital that the international community base its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmental movement.

I cited these few examples because environmentalism is, at its heart, anti-human and virtually all of its goals are designed to reduce human life by, among other proposals, denying electricity where there is none, the banning of pesticides to reduce insect and rodent predation of crops and food, attacking the use of genetically modified seeds to increase crops that are made resistant to drought or insects, or which contain Vitamin A to reduce blindness. Greens have even opposed the flush toilet.

Instead they work to shut down industries, to deny access to the mining of minerals necessary to the modern world, to make access to oil or natural gas impossible or too costly, and would even eliminate the use of incandescent lightbulbs. Al Gore, the most odious of these vile people has written that the world should rid itself of the internal combustion engine!

The next time you hear an environmentalist sound off, remember they hate mankind. For this alone they represent a threat as big or bigger than the current crop of Islamic crazies.