I’m fortunate to have two rather nice parks close to where I live. One of them is small but especially picturesque with a lake that previously was used for fishing. One trouble with that was that you couldn’t walk around it without the fishermen (they were all men) telling you to hush so as not to scare the fish away. Things improved when the Council transferred the fish to another lake and the water became populated by ducks of various kinds and visited by a variety of other birds, some of them pretty unusual – herons, cormorants, sand martins for example. But it’s always the pair of large beautiful swans living on the lake that attract most attention. This is mainly because of their annual breeding routine which sees them bring into the world as many as seven youngsters at a time that soon become as big as they are while still having the dark plumage of cygnets.
Pigeon feeding and chasing
And, of course, there are the pigeons – the dozens of pigeons, which get well fed by visitors with seed available from the park’s food and drinks kiosk. The visitors often come to the park with their families to walk round and maybe use the other facilities like the children’s play area or the small community centre. As for the pigeon feeding, it’s in the area around the kiosk, close to the water’s edge, that most of it takes place. It’s mainly peaceful with some of the pigeons tame enough to perch on people’s arms or shoulders (if you like that kind of thing). But in that area, walking round I’d also sometimes notice a young child or two chasing pigeons and causing them to fly off in fright – something I didn’t like. But, a short time ago, something happened that moved me to do more than just observe. On a warm summer’s day a child of perhaps 3 or 4 years old was going after pigeons with a stick in his hand frightening them and causing them to hop off or fly away. He was largely unsuccessful in his efforts to use the stick on them, but I noticed that one of them had a bleeding wound and was having more trouble escaping than the others. I asked the child to stop, telling him it was cruel and he wouldn’t like to be chased. He stopped but at the same time looked at me in a bemused fashion and this drew the attention of a group of adults nearby.
One of these turned out to be the child’s mother, who then addressed me saying something like ‘he’s only little’. ‘Okay’, I replied, ‘but that’s when they learn and it’s not right for them to chase and scare the birds’. The situation then escalated. She took a hostile stance, started to walk towards me and shouted ‘f… off’. I felt I needed – on reflection – to say something in reply. So I retorted ‘You’re a very rude woman’. ‘I’ll be even ruder’, she said and got her phone out, made as though to make a call while calling me a ‘nonce’ and saying I liked hanging round children. She and the group she was with then walked away. But as they did, it looked as though she was using her phone to take photos.
Facebook support
I have to say that this (ie the phone use) bothered me and, when I got home, I thought I’d better ‘get in first’ – just in case. So I put a post on the local community Facebook page recounting what had happened and ending it with ‘So just to let you know the kind of thing you may face if you’re inclined to try and stop kids being cruel to animals’. A shoal of responses from people on the site followed, the vast majority supportive. Examples were: ‘Animal cruelty – psychopathic behaviour’; ‘You should have taken a video of the woman … she was obviously acting in a threatening way and slandered you too’; ‘How your child treats other people and animals says a lot about how they’re treated at home … because kids reflect what’s poured into them’; ‘Her behaviour explains the child’s behaviour – mean, uneducated and unnecessary’; ‘I’m sorry you were targeted like that and threatened for trying to do the right thing for the poor pigeons. People like that mother ruin the park for others’; ‘Calling someone a nonce is absolutely disgraceful and infuriating. I wish I’d been there to defend you.’
Empathy or rivalry?
Needless to say, I was touched by many of these. They made me feel that, despite the fact that so much of what goes on in the society we live in to promote thoughtlessness and cruelty towards others, be they humans or other living things, there is in most people a core of empathy that emerges when the situation requires it. Given the chance, people will almost instinctively choose an ethic of compassion and mutual aid rather than the one of rivalry and competition that is promoted by the economic basis of the society we live in with its money system. How much more likely is it then when we choose a different kind of social and economic set-up – a socialist world of common ownership and free access to all goods and services – that human beings, as the eminently flexible creatures we are, will choose as a matter of course to act in the interests of the community as a whole … and in so doing act in their own interests too.
Howard Moss
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That's the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
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