For the record, the bird in question did not, in fact, retaliate immediately but rest assured that an organized strike force has already located Forrest’s car and are coordinating a bombing run.
Gulls take a lot of heat for being a nuissance. At best their excrement perforates eveything in their habitat, and at worst they occasionally steal food right out of innocent civilian hands. They’re labeled as pests in the same way that fruit flies are, and are the object of genuine hate for many city-dwellers, especially in Toronto.
The reality, however, is that gulls are quite remarkable animals, known among their aviatory peers for their relatively high intelligence. Science has proven their ability to use simple tools and problem-solving skills. To my mind it is this ingenuity that brings them to the simple conclusion that the populations of coastal, first-world cities throw away a lot of food, some of it in the middle of the street. Already predisposed to scavenging, it’s easy to hear them saying, “Beat’s fishin’.”
Seriously, if you caught wind that a local electronics outlet was throwing thousands of Playstation 3‘s into their dumpsters because the boxes had been bent in a massive inter-departmental warehouse paintball fight, you’d consider the resulting sea of human flesh descending upon those waste sites as a perfectly natural phenomenon.
So cut the wretched shit-bombing sky-rats a bit of slack.
Ja.