Several of weeks ago, I had a meeting with a few people — Shin and Khalid Jaafar were two of them — at Bangsar. While committing myself to an impossible search for a parking space there, I saw a Kuala Lumpur city hall squad shooting down crows. There were countless of crows hovering the area at that time, producing annoying noise. It’s easy to hate the crows for that. While I agree that the noise is a nuisance, I completely disagree with the scourge. The city hall was, and very likely, is, attending to the symptoms, not the root cause. Therefore, there’s a better way to deal with the crows, as a friend advised me during the meeting.
First of all, it’s important to realize that crows in urban areas are scavengers. Despite the negative connotation the noun scavengers brings, scavengers, crows included, play important role in our ecosystem. Scavengers are practically cleaners, breaking down our food leftovers. As scavengers, crows are attracted to the leftover, essentially waste. Our environment as a whole would be a very bad place to live in without scavengers.
It’s highly likely that the reason why the flock of crows hover Bangsar, or any area of that matter, is the presence of waste. Hence, if city hall is really interested in solving the problem, city hall should clean up the waste produced by Bangsar, which is an affluent area. Or better yet, if the population and visitors of Bangsar wants to solve the problem, they will need to clean up.
The culling is barbaric, regardless whether it happened in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. This is on top of the fact that the culling is ineffective and wasteful exercise, by the very fact that the act of culling attacks the symptom, not the root cause.
