Imagine if ducks were the pet of choice. These ducks are special – they can breed twice a year and live happily in people’s homes.
Being adaptable, these ducks do very well both as domestic pets and in the wild. Pet ducks are usually inside part of the time. Their owners get them desexed, since girls breed twice a year, it would be a giant problem for the owner to keep a girl duck undesexed. Boy ducks are stinky and are desexed to stop them being so macho. It turns out over 90% of owned ducks are desexed.
Sometimes wild ducks will show up on peoples’ doorstep and people feel sorry for them and feed them – in fact 1 in 5 people feed ducks they don’t own! The wild ducks fed by people do very well, but live in the wild and breed and breed and breed.
The local duck rescue society comes out and says “there are too many ducks and we’re having to kill them†but now, instead of focusing on the breeding wild ducks they try to punish duck owners (which is strange given most of their donations come from duck lovers) and say “all you owners are irresponsible and the government should make you desex your ducksâ€.
So they lobby and lobby to get the government to bring in ‘compulsory duck desexing’ for all owners.
But that makes no sense you say – what about the wild ducks? Aren’t they the ones breeding?
Exactly.
