Don't feed the animals

You see it at every park in America (and around the world) that serves food. From the Statue of Liberty, LA Zoo, to Yosemite, you can't feed the animals. It ruins their natural feeding cycle, makes them dependent on humans, and promotes terrorism.


The fundamental problem with people feeding the animals is the lack of an incentive to not feed animals. On one hand, you could obey a sign, but on the other hand you could have a cute squirrel eat out of your hand. The long term issues associated with animal feeding (other than terrorism) do not effect the feeder nearly as much as they effect the food stand vendor, who has to come up with a plan for dealing with a herd of squirrels eating garbage.



How can a park effectively discourage people from feeding animals? That is a good question and its very likely that the answer is "It is impossible" given how long animals have been enjoying handouts. Its likely that entire generations of squirrels have been naturally selected for their cuteness and begging persistence and that if we shot people who fed them, we would soon have no more squirrels in the New York Metropolitan area.

There are three ways to attack this problem, either by making it harder to feed animals, increasing education, or increasing punishment for feeding animals. The way to accomplish the first point is to restrict food, children, and adults that act like children from small furry creatures. This seems like more of a challenge than I'm willing to bite off right now. Most places go for the second option and it is not working, but at minimum is worth continuing. Finally, its pretty clear that our police have better things to do that arrest people from feeding animals, such arresting people for acting like terrorists. So that option is out as well.

The moral of the story is that I'm very willing to believe that for my entire life I'll see people feeding animals under the sign that says "Don't feed the animals".