" CACKLE-PIE "
SIR,—Interest in wild birds, and in small birds especially, has been described as a modern phenomenon, and perhaps one of the oddest paradoxes of our age is that though civilisation has increased and has become apparently increasingly indifferent to the individual's chance of violent death, it has been able to show a continually increasing concern with the protection and preservation of the lives of birds. This phenomenon—inspired, of course, by sloppy sentimentalism- has been strong enough to put on the Statute Book a series d Acts known as The Wild Birds Protection Acts, to found such socie- ties as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Inter- national Society for Bird Preservation, and to cause scientists biologists, ornithologists and others to spend months and even year! in laboratories and on remote islands in order to study the miracle of individual and collective bird life. It expresses itself every Year in hundreds of books, many of them the result of years of pat research, and thousands of articles; it is expressed in thousands ci bird-baths and bird-tables in gardens and backyards everywhere. It is the joy of countless people, from Prime Minister to children To write an article advocating the shooting of small birds as fogd is to imply either that " The Writer of the Article " (I note 10 anonymity) is not aware of these things, or that he does not care damn about them. Because I am aware of them, and because I In care a damn about them, is the reason for my criticism of him. Be: hind the article also lies the implication that the meat situation it this country is so desperate that we must now begin to eat bull- finches instead of beef. This is just nonsense. Even if it were toe. I can still hear the voices of thousands of vegetarians cryin8.1'111. great heartiness " It won't hurt you to go without." Nor will It As Mr. Priestley remarks, it will hurt none of us to give uP 011 1 chump chops and steaks. If " The Writer of the Article " Pref a diet of bull-finches, he is at perfect liberty to prefer it, but be may care to be reminded that the weight of a bull-finch is roug10 1 seven drachms, or about half an ounce, and that the weights Or even some of his larger birds are just as astonishingly small.F_ tolerably satisfying dish he will probably need, therefore, forty NI! If the trouble involved in the capture of forty small birds seems: some of us stupidly uneconomic, he must not mind. Some of us. W. though it seems to a writer who has considered his subject neither aesthetically nor economically, still prefer our birds alive.—
Yours, &c., H. E. BATES. The Granary, Little Chart, Ashford.
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