Grey squirrel bashing represents society's need to discriminate

Picture a supermarket in the sticks, dear reader. Then imagine that a transient—a.k.a., a bum—keeps wandering in, roaming the aisles and generally disturbing shoppers and staff alike. Would you have him trapped and shot? Of course you wouldn't. Normal people would want to see him removed, but not hurt. No reason to be cruel, right?
Yet, the former example is exactly what happened in Crayford, England, only the living being involved was not a human, but a red fox. The vixen reportedly kept wandering into the store. So pest control was contacted, the lactating mother vulpine trapped and executed, and her cubs left to wander the loading bay area in confusion and to fend for themselves, which they probably won't be able to do. Protests and proposed boycotts of Sainsbury's ensued from the incident, and quite rightly too.
Local Donna Zimmer noted, "I will not be shopping with Sainsbury's again as I am disgusted by the way this store opted to contact pest control to have this fox destroyed rather than contact the various wildlife charities such as the RSPCA or The Fox Project that would have come out to check on the animal's health and would have dealt with this situation very differently."
At the end of the day, however, it'll be swept under the rug, because it's only an animal. And not just any animal, mind you, but one that dares to be successful and thrive in our environment. Therefore, we shouldn't worry about indiscriminately murdering them.
We humans sprang from the deep well of nature ourselves, but we have largely forgotten that or displaced it in our collective memory. A forest that just sits there and looks beautiful, that isn't being used for military exercises, campgrounds or rich people's sex rituals, is always vulnerable to the whims of developers who are only too keen to build yet another cathedral of retail therapy to the planet's gormless naked apes.
Then there's the bloodthirstiness involved in domineering wildlife, such as we do. For instance, I often wonder what we here in Britain think we're achieving by trying to wipe out the grey squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, in order to "save" the British red squirrel, Sciurus vulgaris. To listen to the sadistic proponents of the native squirrel population, you'd think the grey was "vulgaris".
An army on behalf of the red squirrel has been formed and their aim is to wipe out "the enemy," the American grey squirrels. Never mind that S. carolinensis did not ask to be here. Victorian visitors to North America brought the larger tree rodents back to Britain as "fashionable additions" to estates. The greys found the British climate much to their liking and became successful. So much so that it has been determined that the battle against the grey squirrel has been lost, but that has not deterred the psychopaths of Red Squirrels United, toothless Cumbrian hicks who apparently have nothing better to do but shoot their air rifles at mothering creatures in a land where equalizers dare not be used against humans by civilians, no matter how great the threat.
The problem here is that we're so on guard against the rather natural human instinct to judge and to appraise other humans, which we can no longer due, at least openly, thanks to our Lords Temporal who have burdened us with their political correctness, that we are taking it out on the "lower creatures".


  We were under the impression that humans were not allowed to see color or judge by appearances Image © the BBC
The problem with the reds versus the greys is that the greys outcompete the reds in areas where they clash and that the greys pass the Squirrel Pox Virus onto the reds whose immune systems offer no defense against it. It is noble and good-natured to want to save the red squirrels. It is detestable that killing, either through shooting or poisoning, be the method through which this supposed good-heartedness be expressed.
We can press the issue of native versus non-native. British grey squirrels are a product of their environment stretching back over 140 years. Am I less of a "native" of this land, despite my seventeen years here, my citizenship and my fluency in British English, my accent notwithstanding? I adapted, didn't I? Come 2031, I will have been here for longer than I lived on the other side of the Atlantic. Am I still to be regarded as an "invasive" creature? It only follows, therefore, that we must establish the degree to which a species can be considered native due to its adaptability, correct?
Professor Acorn points out, "the very definition of 'nativeness' used by these organisations is based on political boundaries and associations, rather than by the actual range of species or the birthplace of individuals. To demonstrate how meaningless this is, a polar bear from Alaska would be regarded as 'native' to the Nevada deserts, simply because it is a 'native species' of the USA. This is clearly an absurd definition!"
To wit, one may not like a Yank in their space, but I'm not going anywhere, and neither are the grey squirrels. The numbers of S. carolinensis have grown to over 2.5 million in Great Britain, so the cull being proposed by the red squirrel brigade would never end and represent petty viciousness just for the sake of it.
Red squirrels were not always so adored. Before the greys took over, guess what the attitude to S. vulgaris was? That's right. They were to be abused and driven off. They were not exactly given warm welcome in most residents' gardens. In 1903, the Highland Squirrel Club was formed to do exactly what the Red Squirrel United gang seeks to prevent—a wipeout of S. vulgaris. Should we go after the ancestors of the Highland Squirrel Club rednecks? (In fact, our reds are not native, because they were exterminated and had to be imported back into Britain from Scandinavia!)
The Wildlife Trusts, supposedly there to look after denizens of field and forest, have banded together a group of 5,000 volunteers to "save the red squirrels" by bludgeoning grey squirrels to death. But as the RSPCA's Rob Atkinson noted a few years ago, "Up until the 1970s, you could get a licence to kill red squirrels. So, they were the baddies then. Now it's grey squirrels. There's absolutely no point in doing it." The reason there is no point to it is because loss of habitat and other human activities largely define the decline in the red squirrel population, according to ecologists who have studied the situation and not just taken up clubs and air rifles based on some sick, misplaced and misdirected bout of patriotism. "It's ethically dubious killing one species for the sake of another," Atkinson says.
Can the Wildlife Trusts tell me that they know for sure that the volunteers they have recruited for their indiscriminate, illogical and illiberal cull are not just mindless thugs who enjoy engaging in cruelty?
It's disheartening to see the degree to which we will go after species simply because they affect our comfortability factor. At another supermarket, one we frequent, there were rats in the area. They lived in the bushes and didn't bother anyone. All they did was share the bread that a local resident throws to the pigeons—what "clever" people call "flying rats"—on Saturday mornings. It wasn't long until my wife and I didn't notice their presence anymore. Who were the rats hurting? They were wiped out because they were Rattus norvegicus, no other reason.
We also have the almost complete decimation of zoo creatures in Venezuela, thanks to the people power of socialism that has put the country's human population on the brink of starvation, and the beating up of police horses by the Antifags, er ... Antifa goon squads, so we know where the Left stands on animal rights. Which is, quite demonstrably, to say not at all, because they never offer any condemnation of it. (They'd kick K-9 officers too if only those animals didn't offer the very real possibility of ripping their diseased, worthless guts out.) Bash a squirrel or bash a horse. Gotta have something to crow about on Facebook or Instagram, don't you?
Human beings don't have the best track record in treating each other very equitably, therefore it's no wonder that nature so often suffers by our actions and at our hands. If we are to consider how our actions effect others, to guard against "triggering" our fellow travelers, perhaps we could consider extending that social contract to the creatures among us least able to fight back?