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Eskimo curlews: “Hunters would drive out from Omaha and shoot the birds without mercy until they had literally slaughtered a wagonload of them, the wagon being actually filled, and with the sideboards on at that. Sometimes when the flights were unusually heavy and the hunters well-supplied with ammunition, their wagons were too quickly and easily filled, so whole loads of the birds would be dumped on the prairie, their bodies forming piles as large as a couple of tons of coal, where they would be allowed to rot while the hunters proceeded to refill their wagons with fresh victims.”267

Wilson snipe: “The birds being only in the country for a short time I had no mercy on them and killed all I could, for a snipe once missed might never be seen again.”268

Golden plover: “The gunners had assembled in parties of from 20 to 50 at places where they knew from experience that the plovers would pass. . . . Every gun went off in succession, and with such effect that I several times saw a flock of a hundred or more reduced to a miserable remnant of five or six. . . . The sport was continued all day and at sunset when I left one of these lines of gunners they were as intent on killing more as they were when I arrived [before dawn]. A man near where I was seated had killed 63 dozens. I calculated the number [of hunters] in the field at 200, and supposing each to have shot only 20 dozens, 48,000 golden plovers would have fallen there that day.”269

Ivory-billed woodpeckers: As the state of Louisiana tried desperately in the early 1940s to buy the habitat of the last of these birds in the United States, the board chair of Chicago Mill and Lumber responded, “We are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.” The company argued that cutting this habitat would provide jobs (where have we heard that argument before?) but they lied (where have we seen corporate executives lie before?): their labor force consisted of German POWs, who themselves were “incredulous at the waste—only the best wood taken, the rest left in wreckage.” The trees were used to make chests to hold tea.270

Northern spotted owls: Just to show how much things have changed in the last sixty years, I need to say that, coincidentally, the very day I wrote the previous paragraph, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation carried a news story entitled “B.C. Court OKs Logging in Endangered Owl Habitat.” There are, it seems, only twenty-five pairs of northern spotted owls still living in British Columbia, indeed in Canada. The birds are going extinct in the United States as well. The article stated, “The B.C. Court of Appeal has upheld a lower court ruling permitting old-growth logging in the last remaining habitat for the bird, saying economic interests can be weighed against the interest of the species.”271

Remember that one working definition of insanity is to have lost one’s connections to physical reality, to consider one’s delusions as being more real than the real world. The judges (and other industry representatives) in this case are insane, attempting to “weigh” the needs of an intellectual and philosophical system against living beings.

Of course environmentalists are just as insane. As part of their pathetic and necessarily ineffective “defense” of these and other creatures, environmentalists have been reduced to saying, “If the logging industry gets [sic] a reputation for having killed a [sic] species, they’re not going to benefit because worldwide markets aren’t going to buy wood from B.C. if they know that B.C. logging companies are killing owls to get it.”272

Another reasonable working definition of insanity is that it is insane to keep acting in the same way and to expect different results. Apart from the appalling stupidity of this environmentalist’s statement, it has no basis in historical fact. Destroying the habitat of ivory-billed woodpeckers obviously did not harm the U.S. timber industry. Destroying the