Yes, so much yes. (Although I believe people will be able to). Marie Schatz Fairborn On 1/17/2018 12:00 AM, OHIO-BIRDS automatic digest system wrote: > In 1813 John James Audubon returned to his family in Kentucky after a > long trip finding and studying birds. Upon opening a trunk that > had contained over two hundred drawings of birds, he found a pair of > Norway rats had been raising a family inside, turning most of his > artwork into urine-soaked tatters. > More often than the uncomplimentary--and not always apt--analogy of > rats in a trunk, the condition of human beings in the universe has been > compared to that of cats in a library. Creatures of many admirable > traits, cats nevertheless can have only a very primitive understanding > of a library. Given only an hour or two, they'll wander > among the bookshelves, completely oblivious of their contents. My own > cats loved to sniff a stack of borrowed library books I brought home, > with all their intriguing mixed scents of food and sweat and tobacco. > Patrons of my local library have been known to leave a slice of ham, > presumably used as a bookmark, in a returned volume. Given the run of a > library over a longer period however, cats will eventually knock all the > books to the floor and use them as litter. Not unlike the rats, in the > final analysis. > A being of broader and more complex understanding might look at mankind > in a similar way. We seem to poke curiously around, interested > mostly in personal gratification, often with only a vague notion of the > meaning of the things we find and disturb. Like Audubon's rats, we have > been able to prosper and reproduce our kind--and hence succeed by many > biological criteria--based on the destruction of things we have not > understood. > All too often we behave like rats in the environment we inherit, and > often enough like cats with regard to the great works of nature. Cats > may keep rats under control, and we can govern them to some extent, but > it seems only we can keep ourselves in check. ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Please consider joining our Society, at www.ohiobirds.org/site/membership.php. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: listserv.miamioh.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]