BP DISASTER: PUT THE OIL SPILL BIRDS OUT OF THEIR MISERY

BP DISASTER: PUT THE OIL SPILL BIRDS OUT OF THEIR MISERY

Courtesy of Richard Metzger of Dangerous Minds 

 
Tony Hayward, the tactless sh^*head CEO of BP might “like his life back,” but what about the 99% of the birds caught up in the oil spill catastrophe who will inevitably die from suffocation and liver and kidney damage?

According to a post at Treehugger, animal biologists with experience dealing with birds caught up in oil spills, know what cruel fate has in store for them: slow painful deaths. Conservationists who have set up emergency clean-up centers for oil-coated avians have their hearts in the right place, but scrubbing crude oil off the afflicted birds’ feathers still won’t help them live much longer. The kinder thing to do for the birds—and it pains me to type this—would probably be a mass euthanasia:

Threehugger, quoting Der Spiegel:

Despite the short-term success in cleaning the birds and releasing them back into the wild, few, if any, have a chance of surviving, says Silvia Gaus, a biologist at the Wattenmeer National Park along the North Sea in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.

“According to serious studies, the middle-term survival rate of oil-soaked birds is under 1 percent,” Gaus says. “We, therefore, oppose cleaning birds.”

Instead, she says, it would be less painful for the birds to kill them quickly, or to let them die in peace.

The World Wildlife Fund agrees: “Birds, those that have been covered in oil and can still be caught, can no longer be helped. … Therefore, the World Wildlife Fund is very reluctant to recommend cleaning.”

I’m sure that after reading that depressing bit of information, you’re either weeping or extremely angry. If you want to become even angrier, then read this:

The spill, the scandal and the president: The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder (Rolling Stone)