Charismatic Mini-Fauna
posted by Frank Pasquale
Anyone interested in the Endangered Species Act might enjoy reading D.T. Max’s story on Squirrel Wars in England. The gray squirrel is rapidly displacing the red squirrel because it carries a virus–squirrelpox–to which it is immune (but which kills the reds in a gruesome manner). Given the virulence of squirrelpox, I’m sympathetic with a quarantine effort, but some members of the House of Lords believe something more is at stake:
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy, the 21st to hold that title in Scotland, [has] point[ed] out the inherent superiority of the red over the gray squirrel: “Red squirrels,” she said, “are rather like quiet, well-behaved people who do not make a nuisance or an exhibition of themselves or commit crimes and so do not get themselves into the papers in the vulgar way gray squirrels do.”
And who brought these vulgarians to England’s green and pleasant land? The “first gray squirrels came to Britain to amuse the rich, probably in the early 19th century,” having been imported from America. As Max quotes one Oxford squirrel authority, “I know of more than one patriotic Englishman who has been embittered against the whole American nation on account of the presence of their squirrels in his garden.”
October 6, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Posted in: Environmental Law
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