When it comes to animals doing what comes natural, let's keep it in perspective
It was like any other grisly murder scene, except more pink.
Twenty-five corpses and no murder weapon, but one suspect. According to The Guardian, “A wild fox in Washington, D.C., has chewed through a fence at the National zoo and killed 25 flamingos in the worst animal attack there in two decades.”
Terrible. Except, don’t make it sound like a nightclub shooting. I don’t think the fox was out to break the record. And, just curious: What happened two decades ago? Did the elephant step on a flea circus?
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Employees at the National Zoo in Washington felt certain it was a fox that squeezed through a hole in a fence due to the time-honored legal dicta that, well, a fox gonna fox.
The flamingos couldn’t fly away because their wings are clipped expressly to prevent them from flying away. But they say that doesn’t excuse the predator. So it’s an “Animal House” situation: They can’t mutilate our flamingos, only we can mutilate our flamingos.
Flamingos. Why is it that bizarre stories have a Florida connection, even if they don’t happen in Florida? It’s like the National Zoo imported stupid.
Not that I’m blaming the flamingos, you understand, but I’m certainly not blaming the fox. You can’t blame a guy for eating. He’s just doing what comes naturally.
Or at least he was, past tense, doing it. The zoo caught the fox — or at least they caught a fox — and had it euthanized.
The zoo acknowledged that it couldn’t be a hundred percent certain the fox they caught was the perpetrator who snuffed the flamingos, but hey, we did the same thing in the 1950s: We couldn’t be sure the people we accused of selling nuclear secrets to the Soviets were guilty either, but killing a few suspects would deter everyone else.
Probably all the other foxes back in the den are saying, “Whoa, did you see what happened to Phil? We better go back to eating chicken.”
Some people are philosophically opposed to zoos to begin with. I don’t fall into that category, but I do kind of think euthanizing an animal was a weird thing for a zoo, of all institutions, to do. For the crime of eating.
What, exactly, did they hope to accomplish? Did they think the fox had a taste for flamingos now, so it was going to be marauding backyards in Chevy Chase eating up everyone's shore birds? Or was this a revenge killing?
Did some zoo mobsters, dressed in zoot suits of course, wipe out the fox because it broke the code? “Here you go Abigail, here's a Tommy gun and Havahart trap — try to make it look like an accident.”
The National Zoo, meanwhile, wants you to be sure to know that it didn’t do anything wrong. “The barrier we used passed inspection and is used by other accredited zoos across the country,” said the zoo director, Brandie Smith.
Still, this represents just one more example of America’s crumbling infrastructure. And if collapsing bridges aren’t enough to get Congress to act, I can’t imagine a few dead flamingos are going to change anything. (What? Congress did act? Oh yeah, I forgot. What ever became of that?)
I do know a little bit about foxes, and they are amazing creatures — but unless the fence is rusted or something, they do not have the capability to chew through metal fences. Unless this is some new race of Super Fox. In which case, flamingos should be the least of our worries.
Indeed, ABC News reports, “It's the latest fox-related disruption in the nation's capital, where just last month a rabid red fox attacked a congressman, who fought it off with an umbrella and had to get rabies shots.”
It’s amazing that we have a new breed of fox that attacks members of Congress. It’s even more amazing that people are complaining about it.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Fox attacking flamingos in DC made to sound like nightclub shooting
