If she was going around lighting buildings on fire because of her condition, she’d be arrested and locked away faster than you can blink.
The authorities are unwilling to arrest a woman who is clearly breaking laws, destroying property, and endangering the health of other citizens because they’re afraid of “looking bad”? Funny, considering the SFPD isn’t afraid to look bad fatally shooting unarmed citizenry at the slightest procovation.
Intent and the level of destruction make a hell of difference when it comes to lighting buildings on fire. I’m sure rounding up all the severely mentally ill hoarders and homeless then tossing them into jail with a bunch of violent criminals will solve all of the world’s problems. I bet that’s what cops live for.
There’s a reason we have mental institutes and low-security prisons. Arresting someone doesn’t mean automatically throwing them in a pit with the hardened criminals.
I’d rather have this woman in the system with people accountable for what she does rather than letting her roam free without any restrictions, particularly since she is endangering human health and lives in addition to mere property destruction.
But if you prefer a different analogy, fine. If she was releasing wolverines into the environment instead of rats, she’d be locked up. Or if she was leaving envelopes full of virulent pathogens or biohazardous materials in public parks, she’d be locked up. If she was doing any of countless comparable acts, she’d be locked up.
Close, but not exactly.
Is anyone sure that she isn’t planning on moonlighting as a pied piper, once her army of educated rodents have taken a grip of the city?
I’ll bet he had the happiest terrier in DC, who got to spend his days doing what they’re made for.
I’m not sure I want to read that. That looks effing disgusting.
Why do people hate pigeons? Do they actually damage things? I think they are rather pretty and amusing then their coo is, to me at least, very soothing. I’d rather be around several hundred pigeons than four children any day of the week.
It isn’t the same thing.
One is the most disgusting form of vermin that lives off of the excess of human society, and is only worthy of eradication, and the other is a wonderfully adaptive and somewhat intelligent rodent.
Never loved anywhere near where pigeons roost have you? The issue is generally guano. They tend to hang about near where people eat, and having a flock of shitting feather dropping birds about isn’t very sanitary (think when someone starts feeding gulls at a beach).
Also, these little buggers:
shudder
I’ve lived in a moderately-siced city (PDX) between around 20th and Lovejoy and 12th and Montgomery for 26 of my years, if you don’t know the area it’s “downtown”. I have always eaten outdoors when seasonally appropriate. I have sat in shit, been shit on, and all that you mention. I’ll stand by my original statement. Human filth bothers me a whole shit ton more from noise pollution to excreta and most of us offer less on the “plus” column than the fair pigeon.
Won’t deny the terrible horror of human filth, but that being said, I’m one of those weird people who just doesn’t like getting shit on regardless of the species of defecator…
Also, cooing is nice, screaming kids not so much (and I say this as a parent)…
Probably because they’re prodigious shitters-all-over-everything. The shit is difficult to remove from any surface, and has the annoying feature of being a bright blob of white, unless your car is white, when it appears as a disgusting brown / black dumplet.
I found one of these in my closet years ago. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a pile of cat toys.
I’m hypertensive (last check was 148/98) and take about $800 worth of meds for anxiety and even when I was unmedicated I couldn’t be arsed over it more than an occasional “aw man”. And cars? How about having it all over your motorcycle seat and handlebars? Still better than four kids talking over each other or the average litter generated by even a small fast food eatery or the cologne from about every fourth man and sixth woman I encounter (or every second male adolescent).
Hey, I’m not against getting rid of the kids, the fast food joints, or at least every second male adolescent. Just make sure the pigeons go with them.
I’ll just link to a comment I made re: the UCSB shooting. We’re, in theory, a free society. You can’t just “bring people in” for being mentally ill unless they’re “gravely disabled” or an imminent threat to a specific other person. Screwing up your living situations, being homeless, etc. doesn’t qualify.
Oh do we?
I have students who work in San Francisco area jails in the mental health sections. You have to be phenomenally unsafe to be kept there, because our jails and prisons are overcrowded, and our courts are perpetually back-logged.
Know why? Thanks to Reagan and Bush and the neo-liberals, we’ve been trying to “drown government in a bathtub” for 25 years plus, and nobody wants to pay taxes on their income or their property or their business activities so there’s no damn money to fund things like mental health beds and therapists* and psychiatrists and judges and clerks and courtrooms and treatment programs.
*Which explains why my students - the least trained, the greenest, the most naive, of all people in the field, are providing services to the sickest people: because they can be gotten to work for FREE. Hearts of pure spun gold, energy to do the work of two and three normal humans, courage out the wazoo my students have, but at the end of the day they are still so green they squeak when they walk, and they’re seeing clients I don’t know that I could work with.
If you have an alternate hypothesis, I’d be interested to hear it; but the reticence of the authorities, despite apparent statutory support for action, is simply a fact of the story, however implausible we may find it. All we can do is try to discern the motives.
Am I the only one who thought the headline and summary said “woman enjoys breastfeeding rats”? I read the article twice looking for a mention of breastfeeding.
