In a message dated 12/27/97 17:13:30, Mike Price wrote:

<<In many places there's no difference between wartime and peacetime, soldier
and civilian, young boy or grown man: this kind of slaughter is incessant
and year-round, more noticeable during north and southbound migrations due
to the increased abundance of targets. In some places it's regulated. You
wouldn't understand, Diann: it's a guy thing.>>

It's a GUY thing? How about it's an "anybody-with-a-gun thing?" (Substitute
the analogy of your choice for "gun": there's those guys waving their guns
around again, showing off, trying to be Mr. Bigshot - same as always.)

from Dale Goble:
<<Actually, war is often quite beneficial to animal populations -- when
humans are slaughtering one another they generally stop slaughtering other
species.>>

>From the November, 1997 issue of Natural History magazine (page 12) - from an
essay by Samuel Johnson in 1758:

...the easiest way to find food, [the female vulture] told [her offspring],
was to look for the place where armies were waging war: "When you hear noise
and see fire which flashes along the ground, hasten to the place with your
swiftest wing, for men are surely destroying one another; you will then find
the ground smoaking with blood and covered with carcasses, of which many are
dismembered and mangled for the convenience of vultures."
Man, the old vulturess concluded, with his penchant for self-destruction,
"shews by his eagerness and diligence that he is, more than any of the others,
a friend to vultures."


--Tay

Taylor Harrison
THarrisIII at aol.com
(lurking at Woodinville, WA)

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