Vertebrate Pest Conference Proceedings collection

 

Date of this Version

September 1984

Abstract

The politics of pesticides is a rather humorless topic, as I'm sure most of you know. I've always been told that when you start an address or make a speech you ought to have some kind of humor, if for no other reason that you at least get your audience to listen to you for two minutes during any presen-tation. For those of you that may be members of the Audubon Society or members of the Sierra Club, I'll, in advance, make my apologies for the joke I'm about to tell. It's not really meant as a put down if you happen to be a member of one of those esteemed groups, but I do think it's indicative of what we today face. Because the only endangered species on the face of the earth today are those of you who happen to use synthetic chemicals to try to benefit mankind. Now, the joke goes something like this. It seems that two Martians landed outside a small U.S. desert town (not too awfully far from here, if you want to know the truth), and the Martians descended from their spacecraft and walked into this town and the first thing they ran into was a deserted gas station. Here are the gas pumps all sitting in a row, and one of the Martians mistook one of the gas pumps to be a human being and, interestingly enough, one of the Martian's name was Sierra Club and the other was named Audubon Society.

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