Don’t Feed The Ducks!
I always enjoy the Tuna Traveler column in The Jewish Press. Really informative and well written. However, in your recent May 31 article, you encourage visitors to the Baltimore waterfront to “feed the ducks and geese with your leftover croutons or any other stale food…bring plenty.” This is a cruel practice. The natural diet of waterfowl is vegetation. Throwing any “stale food” or leftovers will injure their digestive tracts.
And most important, you must not be aware of the wing deformities (referred to as “airplane wing” or “angel wing”) that are caused by the parents of the goslings consuming bread or bread products. The goslings are born with twisted wing malformations which prevent flight. That means that when they reach adulthood, they cannot fly away from predators, and when their habitat – a pond or lake or stream – freezes, or their usual food source is gone, they starve to death, not being able to travel with the flock. Here’s a site that tell you more:
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/geese-ducks-don-t-feed-bread-1.5115103
Many thanks!
Pamela Ryder
Animalnation.org (check us out online)
TT responds:
I’m always grateful when readers reach out because a Tuna Traveler column helped inspire their own trip, or to share their experiences living in or visiting a destination I covered. Thank you especially for the links you shared that included the following: “The RSPCA advises against feeding bread to wild birds” and that according to The Canal & Rivers Trust, “Healthy alternatives” to bread for water birds include sweetcorn, lettuce, frozen peas, oats, and seeds. I’m going to have to find alternative uses for our old croutons and bread (I’d welcome additional suggestions because we hate throwing food away). Also, shoutout to my sister who had a great idea for a chessed project: asking guests to create sachets of peas, seeds, and oats to distribute on their trips to local parks with ponds to help educate others about the hazards of feeding bread to ducks and fish. Happy (tuna) travels!
Why Is Israel Aiding the Enemy?
I cannot understand why there are so many questions and concerns as to whether or not there is a famine in Gaza (“Columbia Business Professors to JPost: There Is No Famine in Gaza,” June 21). The question that needs to be asked is why is Israel allowing any aid into Gaza?
In the long history of warfare, what country has ever provided food, water, electricity, and other aid to its enemies prior to the end of hostilities? Even more so for a defensive war against a brutal barbaric regime which deliberately targeted Jewish civilians with numerous rockets, and murdered, raped, and burned people alive in a hateful rampage. Hamas is an evil terror organization which still holds hostages, and we now know murdered at least some of them while in captivity. Hamas has pledged to repeat the October 7 attacks until Israel is eliminated.
And of course, poll after poll shows that greater than 70% of the people in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria still support the October 7 attacks.
Cutting off supplies to the enemy is called a siege – a war tactic used since time immemorial to end wars as quickly as possible by forcing the enemy into submission. With the case of Israel, a siege along with aerial bombing would be a means to rapidly weaken Hamas without sending in IDF ground troops. A siege would also exert more pressure to get the hostages out.
The question which must be asked to a hypocritical world should not be whether or not there is famine in Gaza, but rather what would your country do if faced with the same situation as Israel? If your answer is different than what you are insisting Israel do, you need to stop making ludicrous demands and allow Israel to complete its war objectives.
We all know what every country including America would do if faced with the same situation as Israel. Did the allies send aid to Nazi Germany or imperial Japan? Any other country faced with what Israel is dealing with would cut off all supply routes to the enemy and exert maximum military pressure until there is unconditional surrender.
If Israel would have completely cut off Gaza on October 8, and exerted maximum military pressure from day one, it would likely be in a far better place today. The war would likely have already ended, more hostages would likely have been released alive, and there would have been far fewer IDF casualties.
It is about time that Israel do what it needs to do in order to complete its war objectives. Israel must ignore a hypocritical world that only seems to apply so-called “international law” to just one country which just happens to be the only Jewish state on earth.
Jay Lehman
Silver Spring, MD
The Pointless Pursuit of Peace With “Palestinians”
I agree with Avi Abelow’s article in the June 21 issue that the world has been fed a false narrative that we “arrived” here, and that Palestinian Arabs are indigenous to the area. Attempts to solve the Arab/Israeli conflict regularly fail because of the refusal to acknowledge that this dispute has never been about borders, territory, or settlements, but about the Arabs’ refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist. “The struggle with the Zionist enemy is not a matter of borders, but touches on the very existence of the Zionist entity,” declared an Arab spokesman.
Unlike the Nazis who carefully concealed the Final Solution, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority openly avow their intentions in their charter and covenant and in the Arab media which is available in English on the Internet.
Coercing Israel to make concessions and accept a two-state solution will not bring peace to the region. One-sided concessions have convinced the Arabs of the rightness of their policies and the efficacy of using violence to cleanse the country of Jews and Christians.
What compelling reason do Arabs have to stop launching rockets indiscriminately into Israeli cities, refuting the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, destroying artifacts and Jewish holy sites, denying the Holocaust, dehumanizing Jews in their media, textbooks, educational system, political discourse, religious sermons by portraying them as Satan, sons of apes and pigs, a cancer, and using children as homicide bombers, if the West does not hold them accountable?
Instead of demanding that Arabs cease their incitements and attacks, the U.S issues meaningless statements of condemnation, and then grants them foreign aid, arms and military training. The U.S. pressures Israel to make goodwill gestures in “peace negotiations,” yet Israel has never been the aggressor. Is there any example in history where a victor withdraws from territory when the defeated party does not sue for peace, admits there will never be any reconciliation, declares they will not concede the victor’s right to exist, and labors relentlessly to destroy him?
When Israel opens her border checkpoints as an act of goodwill, the Arabs dispatch homicide bombers to maim and kill Israeli civilians. After Arab terrorists are released from Israeli prisons, they revert to murdering Jews.
Whether it is naiveté, self-delusion, or hubris, a number of U.S. presidents and diplomats have assumed that their powers of persuasion could modify fiercely held beliefs about the sanctity of Arab land. Such reasoning has consistently failed.
This latest drive to establish separate Arab and Jewish states will fail because, as Yasser Arafat said, “We don’t want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel…. For us it is shame and injustice. We shall fight on to victory. Even for decades, for generations, if necessary.”
Brian Goldenfeld
Oak Park, CA
