Me-Gulls

As someone who lives near the beach, I feel qualified to make the following observation: Seagulls are evil. No, you say. Not seagulls. Yes, seagulls. They dig through your garbage, dump on everything they see, serve only themselves -- they are the lawyers of marine vertebrates.

Contrary to myth, seagulls are not friendly. A seagull's opinion of you is based largely on whether or not you are holding food, which includes but is not limited to bread, items that look like bread, and small bread-like pets. Seagulls are timid individually but grow cocky in numbers until, worst case, they conspire to seize you Alfred Hitchcock style.

It's getting worse, too. You can't even go to the beach after dark. You might find yourself cornered by a gang of hardened seagulls...

"What is this, bread?! No, man, we meant bread. We want your flockin' money."

One day I left a trash bag outside while tending to a phone call. I opened the door to find a wake of garbage leading to the avenue where four seagulls were fighting to the death over a gritty burrito. Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!

On a recent trip, I landed on Ana Cappa Island (or, if you've seen the guano, Ana Crappa Island). This is the Cancun of seagull social life. Males come from all over to get drunk, have wild orgies, then fly away like nothing happened. Females stay behind to hatch their eggs and occasionally LASH OUT AT HIKERS. No kidding. One bloodied my ankle when I wandered off to pee. Good thing I'm quick with a zipper.

Seagulls relieve themselves ten times more often than necessary, something they call recreational discharge. They bomb your windshield, your children, your newly dry-cleaned business suit. Father seagulls hover in the sky teaching the ropes to their children.

"The trick to hitting a moving target, son, is to release early like this..."

And let's not forget the seagull that dropped a turtle on a Miami motorist, causing a four-car collision. Coincidence? Don't be naive.

Now I don't believe in killing animals. As a boy, I invested two months' allowance to free the lobsters from our local supermarket. It would serve society to have a restaurant where people are forced to pet their food before it is cooked, a Meet-Your-Meat Cafe. If they want to order after that, they've earned it.

That said, I think we should consider eating seagulls. They feed on garbage, breed by orgy, and would kill us first if they could only muster the numbers. Imagine the uses: seagull piccata, seagull noodle soup, Thanksgiving seagull. I'll bet if we asked nicely, Ted Nugent would try seagull tartare.

How did seagulls make the white list anyway? Chickens and ducks get the knife, but seagulls are free to wander the skies excreting on our youth. I thought the rule was that it's okay to eat animals so long as they're not smart or cuddly. Seagulls are barely bright enough to avoid large buildings and so unattractive that when they mate, they think of pelicans. So it goes.

Even as we speak -- no kidding -- there is a seagull outside my window, squawking like a madman at life, the universe, and everything. He won't look me in the eye; seagulls never do. He'll just get a sense of me like a felon with a very dark story. And if I know seagulls like I think I do, he is waiting for the right moment to relieve himself, painful though it is to hold the runs from a burrito he swallowed whole in his effort to hoard it from the others who are still in the street crying out in those shrill lawyer voices, Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!