Death to ibis

I contacted our council a while back about the evil ibis, which is a native bird around here. The pesky little bastards are fearless and stick their long beaks into everything in search of a feed. That includes rubbish bins like these. On the day I took this photo, one ibis managed to almost empty this bin whilst looking for a few tasty treats. That left the ground covered in crap - literally - since this bin is outside a playground and the bin is usually half full of nappies.



I asked the council to consider putting in bins with lids instead. I got a very nice response, saying they had bins with lids previously, but some little bastards (not their words) set fire to the bins. As they were plastic, well, you can imagine the rest. The response was to replace them with steel bins with fixed lids that can't be ripped off.

My response was "shoot the birds and the vandals". I don't think I will hear back from council again in regard to this matter.

I am a little bit ticked off, in that the usual reaction was a knee jerk reaction. I should have asked how many bins were sacrificed to Baal. If it was only one, why not put that down to drunken adolescent stupidity (been there, done that) and replace the bin with another plastic one and carry on?

What is the acceptable rate of bin burning before you cut your losses and switch to a different type? I have no idea what bins cost, but I would have thought that unless half a dozen are being immolated in the same spot per year, you'd stick with a model that is easy to empty, yet bird-proof.

I'd hate to think that the council fell for a spot of moral panic and decided to switch out the bins after just one or two bonfires. That kind of thing annoys me. There will always be idiots. Generally, they grow up and become half responsible, only to be replaced with another generation of idiots. It's a fact of life. You just have to accept a certain amount of stuff will be written off by idiots, who then grown up to become taxpayers, and have to pay for the stupid stuff that the current generation is doing. That's what I call an inter-generation transfer of stupidity tax.

My solution to bin burning is simple. Glue a large plastic bottle full of napalm, with a suitable explosive charge, to the inside of each bin. When the bin is set alight, the napalm bomb goes off, and you simply scour the burns units of the closest hospitals for likely suspects.

Or you scrape their blackened corpses off the grass and replace the bin (and bomb) with a new one.

Works for me.