I can't believe how much animosity is within humans. It is the reaction to squirrels that brings up this topic. And yet there they are up in the Norway Maple running along its broad arms and up and down its trunk, all along the fence jumping up and down, and into the garden amongst the plants along with the birds - the birds can actually sit on the leaves of daffodils and other perennials.
Cute as that is to me, squirrels bring forth rage and fury. The major cause of animosity from the articles I read centres around bird feeders. Mostly they are opinion pieces - love or hate articles about squirrels. There are lots of opinions about squirrels. I found some intriguing information - that squirrels attack and bite people. This from The Atlantic:
"... Adam wasn’t bitten, thankfully. The squirrel leaped onto his chest, then quickly bounded off onto a nearby tree. (“So, basically parkour,” he said.) And it’s actually pretty rare for squirrels to carry rabies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Small mammals such as squirrels, rats, mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, gerbils, chipmunks, rabbits, and hares are almost never found to be infected with rabies and have not been known to cause rabies among humans in the United States,”
What level of concern should we have?
"Between 1999 and 2015, the most recent year for which the CDC has published data, 522 people in the United States were killed by dogs and 1,231 people were killed by other non-human mammals—meaning farm animals, mostly, according to a 2012 study published in the journal of Wilderness & Environmental Medicine, including cats, cows, horses, pigs, raccoons, and other hoofed livestock. Another 1,400 people were killed by venomous plants, scorpions, wasps, or bees during that time. “Squirrels aren’t among those listed,” a CDC spokesman told me. “It’s more snakes, spiders, and a few more common things.”
"Squirrels mostly don’t bother people, let alone maim them. But they are everywhere, and that’s not always a good thing for humans. Then again, you might say the same thing about people if you were a squirrel."
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