Are Oil-Covered Birds from the Gulf Spill Better Off Dead?

The answer to the above question? Yes, and from the way BP has been bumbling this whole thing, I’m sure a few executives wouldn’t mind joining them right now.

For all you animal lovers out there, I’ll preface this post by saying that I, too, love animals (a lot more than humans sometimes, but not in that obsessive PETA kinda way), and I’m not trying to say that they’re not worth saving – I’m saying that most of them can’t be saved. Despite the inspirational pictures and videos you’ve seen of birds being washed and cleansed of our environmental disaster, a German biologist has found that…

“According to serious studies, the middle-term survival rate of oil-soaked birds is under 1 percent,” Gaus says. “We, therefore, oppose cleaning birds.”

Those Germans…always talking about genocide as the final solution. But in this case, they may be right – these animals suffer greatly even after they’ve been cleaned. Animal-rescue workers have been forcing birds to ingest coal solutions or Pepto Bismol to cough up the poisonous oil, but the stress on their bodies is too much and they eventually die from kidney and liver damage anyway. Here’s more from this Debbie Downer…

Once covered in oil, a bird will use its bill and tongue to remove the toxic substance from their feathers. Despite oil’s terrible taste and smell, a bird will still try and clean itself because it can’t live without fluffy feathers that repel water and regulate its body temperature. “Their instinct to clean is greater than their instinct to hunt, and as long as their feathers are dirty with oil, they won’t eat,” Gaus says.

I’ve seen people cite research that puts the survival rate at 10%, not 1%, but those odds are still pretty shitty either way. In the 2002 Prestige oil spill, off the coast of Spain, 250,000 birds were killed. Thousands were cleaned, but only 600 lived long enough to be released, and their average lifespan after that was about a week. Even the WWF (no, not the wrestling federation) had this to say at the time…

A spokesman from the organization said: “Birds, those that have been covered in oil and can still be caught, can no longer be helped…Therefore, the World Wildlife Fund is very reluctant to recommend cleaning.”

When even the bleeding-heart animal rights groups are saying they’re a lost cause, you know it’s bad. So why are we still cleaning these animals, wasting valuable money and manpower that could be used in cleaning up the mess to begin with? “Ethical reasons” is usually the answer, but I think it may be more out of ignorance than anything else.

I’m not saying animal rights activists are all uneducated, but just look at PETA. They have no qualms about roping in any typical, impressionable vegan college student with shocking images of animal abuse and man’s inhumanity and using them to stage their outrageous propaganda campaigns that not only solve nothing, but conveniently leave out the fact that their organization is just as bad, if not worse. Their supporters will spend countless hours reading cruelty-free product guides, crying during anti-circus documentaries, or pouring fake blood all over themselves at useless protests, but they won’t take five minutes to Google the countless websites that expose PETA for the hypocritical charlatans that they are. They kill more animals than they save, but ask your average PETA supporter about it and they’ll give you a look like you told them that you just hit their puppy with your car. They may think they’re doing something to change the world, but the only thing they really affect is Ingrid Newkirk’s bank account.

Speaking of bank accounts, this leads me to another point I must make – if this has been known amongst wildlife groups for several years now, why are companies like Proctor & Gamble running commercials that often claim the contrary, or just neglecting to mention the oily truth? P&G are the makers of Dawn, the best-selling brand of dishwashing liquid in the United States, and if you’ve watched TV any time in the last two years, you’ve probably seen this commercial, which started running in the summer of 2009 and has been running again frequently since the Gulf disaster…

Yeah, we all like to be cheered up in times like these, but c’mon – this is just outright manipulation. They’ve sent 7,000 bottles to the Gulf already, and for each bottle of Dawn you buy, they donate $1 to the Marine Mammal Center and the International Bird Rescue Research Center. But aren’t both of those organizations well aware that their efforts are for naught? Considering the Marine Mammal Center has a science section on their website and the International Bird Rescue Research Center’s site has a page dedicated to properly cleaning oiled birds, I’d say so, but since they probably get a lot of money from P&G to keep their doors open, it’s probably best to keep the cute seal pictures coming and the truth carefully hidden. So what does P&G get out of this? I think you’re smart enough to put two and two together here, but maybe this excerpt from their Wikipedia entry will help you put things in perspective…

As of mid 2010, P&G is the 6th most profitable corporation in the world, and the 5th largest corporation in the United States by market capitalization, surpassed only by Apple, Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, and Walmart. It is 6th in Fortune’s Most Admired Companies 2010 list. P&G is credited with many business innovations including brand management and the soap opera.

Besides the key word there, “profitable,” there’s another important term in that paragraph worth highlighting – “brand management.” This involves the way people view a particular company and/or product, which usually relates to why and how often they’ll throw money at said company and/or product. In fact, Proctor & Gamble are widely credited with creating the idea of brand management, so it’s no surprise how shrewd they’re acting in this particular case. They get to be a big corporation and please the hippy, tree-hugging yahoos! It’s a win-win! And even if you don’t have solar panels in your home or spell like patchouli, are you going to buy the cheap knock-off soap or the reliable, well-advertised dishwashing liquid that “saves” animals sitting on the shelf right next to Brand X? Using these good-as-dead creatures to sell soap is an all-time low that even Tyler Durdan wouldn’t stoop to. That and they created the soap opera, so if that doesn’t prove they’re pure evil, I don’t know what does.

I’m a caring person, but I’m also a logical one, and I support euthanasia for a reason. In the same way that many invalids can’t tell you to just pull the plug, these birds can’t tell you how fucked their insides are. I understand that people feel like we owe it to them anyway, but let me put it this way – when your own pet is suffering, do you let it suffer or do you take it for one last ride to the vet? There are bigger and better things these activists can be doing to help the increasingly screwed Gulf environment, and the fact that companies are actually profiting from this mess should be even more motivation to keep them out of it. The bottom line is it’s not wrong to try and save these birds, but it’s wrong to manipulate people into thinking they can for $2.99.