THEIR domain is the sky but they come down here, stealing all our chips and pecking us oan the heid. They have a cheek. Once, I think, we felt sorry for gulls. Their mewling many miles above makes such a lonely, haunted miserable sound. Put through Google Translate, it says: “Ah’m starvin’, ken?”
Animals and birds have trouble articulating themselves, which is just as well, as they don’t have much to say. The frequent “moo” of a cow in a field is merely the endless repetition of “aye” in the resigned tone of a defeated drunkard staring morosely at the gantry.
This week, the world of Scotland rocked back in horror as Aberdeen North MP Kirsty Blackman gave it large about “absolutely ginormous” seagulls terrorising her community.
In a top debate at yonder Westminster, she was supported by North Ayrshire and Arran MP Patricia Gibson, who held the chamber spellbound with her tales of gallus gulls pouncing on the ice cream of decent ratepayers and even stealing £20 notes from their trusting hands. Vile, frankly.
Berwick-upon-Tweed MP Anne-Marie Trevelyan horrified the assembled mob further with her revelation that citizens in the controversial Borders town had taken matters into their own hands and were striking back at the gulls, stealing their chips and pecking them oan the heid to see how they liked it.
The situation is getting out of hand and demands rational analysis. However, in the absence of that, let me address the nation with the following refutable ruminations.
First, let us acknowledge that, if the shoe were on the other claw, we too would be swooping down and mewling. Mankind will eat his own nose off when starving.
He’d steal food from bairns and make stew from his beloved budgerigar rather than go without pabulum. This whole malign universe is based on eating. If you don’t eat you die and, according to the latest Gallup poll, a sizeable majority of creatures are against dying. Given that scientific-style fact, we have to admit that, for centuries, the gulls showed remarkable restraint.
It’s only recently that they’ve begun to behave disgracefully, perhaps the inevitable result of a process started in the 1960s by the egg-boomer generation.
Secondly, we’re taught never to judge people as groups but as individuals, and perhaps the same may be said of gulls. Recently, in fulfilment of a dream, I went to Anstruther for fish and chips and, eating them in the car by the harbour, I also fed a solitary gull, despite a deep feeling that it was the wrong and unpopular thing to do.
But, just as I am not as other men, he did not seem as other gulls. He was alone, far from the madding flock. His manners were impeccable and he carried himself with dignity. Indeed, I really saw something of myself in him.
All that said, I agree with the pitchfork-wielding mob that something has to be done. My idea of putting large nets over our cities has been pooh-poohed willy-nilly by leading realists.
Another alternative is to cut the gulls’ numbers by destroying their eggs. But that would take for ever and require the services of peculiar enthusiasts.
Some radicals advocate bussing in hawks to scare the gulls but I disapprove of birds of prey and always cheer when rooks mob them.
Nature isn’t red in claw on my watch, unless gulls get ketchup on their feet from a filched kebab.
Perhaps we should take more care of our kebabs. Punishing those who brazenly eat food in the street, often without stainless steel cutlery, is surely an interim solution.
I accept this could lead to rioting by dockside drunkards and seaside hedonists. But tough problems call for tough solutions and not for humans mewling about their rights.
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