To the editor:
On Aug. 27, every one of forty students and two staff members stung was fine — though perhaps shaken — after unknowingly disturbing a nest of yellow jackets at an Ashfield, Massachusetts, school. CBS News emphasized that despite some people receiving multiple stings, no one needed emergency care.
This was good news, except for the fact that officials called in an exterminator “to get rid of the nest,” according to Ashland Fire Chief Keith Robie. Considering that moving a yellow jacket nest takes equipment, experience, and not a small amount of caution, I presume that the exterminator relied on a typical short-sighted protocol of spraying it and its inhabitants with at least one pesticide. Result: a lot of dead yellow jackets that, when alive, work as natural predators of insects that kill crops and garden plants. Yellow jackets are also incidental pollinators, and with populations of bees and birds succumbing to pesticides, among other human-made impediments to wildlife, those yellow jackets should not have been destroyed.
“The kids are okay, they all left with smiles,” mother and teacher, Maria Wentworth, declared. Too bad Ashland’s authorities taught a schoolful of happy, innocent kids that the best and only response when wildlife react to protect home and life is to snuff them out. Once again, we elevated human worth by diminishing and objectifying animals.
Deb Newman
President, Speak Up For Animals
Swampscott
