It was a glorious autumn…

It was a glorious autumn afternoon. We finally arrived at the crest of a wooded hill ashore one of Ontario's many lakes. The view that awaited us was magnificent: a symphony of foliage colours stretched across the horizon, framed by the reddening sky and the deep blue water. And all around us, the ground was strewn with spent beer cans and shotgun shells. Repulsed by that sickening aspect, and the vulgarity it introduced to this otherwise pristine environment, we left the site and hurried home, doing our best to erase that trip from our collective memory.
Allow this cormorant culling proposal, and add to this picture piles of dead and dying cormorants and their young. And don't forget to include this picture in your Ontario tourists brochures, as it is certain to delight those in the angler-hunter community—limitless booze, limitless live target practice—those whom this proposal was meant to please; those, and scarcely anyone else.
But of course, this follows a familiar pattern: we allow abusive treatment of our resources—over-fishing, in this case—and then find a soft target on whom to blame the effect: wolves, seals, cormorants, and then proceed enthusiastically kill it too. And how grotesque it is to cite local tree-damage as justification for this culling, when the damage inflicted by us on the environment is accelerating on a planetary scale and is so profound as to raise the spectre of a new epoch of mass extinction, with our very own existence in question.
That the cormorant happened to be jet black is very convenient, of course. Like the crow and the grackle and the red winged blackbird and the starling (and the black cat, for that matter), the culturally nurtured human aversion to black birds, to some, will soften the edges around that vignette of the dead and wounded birds. Would this happen if the cormorant sported a blue plumage, rather than black? I rather doubt it. And that vignette is redolent not of rotting fish, but of political lobbying.