Kill Them All

I like to think of my mother as the kind of Lady that had three ‘50’s and moved right on into the 80’s but I can’t always do that. I mean this is a person that handwrote a letter every week to the US President to remove our Troops from ‘Nam. I hear that she even once accidentally took part in a sit-in at a café for civil rights.
We were talking about the impending Avian Flu pandemic the other day and she had an interesting solution to preventing an outbreak that could kill millions of people, worldwide.
“These days,” she said, “we have the ability to do to animals what we did with pesticides. I mean, surely, we can find a way to eliminate birds on such a scale and in such a way that won’t hurt anything else.”
“Probably,” I said.
“Well, then, I think we should just kill them all.”
“What?”
“Yes,” she said. “You heard me. We should find a way to kill off all the birds in the world before they kill us. That’s what everyone is predicting is going to happen, right? A Pandemic that can kill off about a third of the population of the planet?. We should just find something that will kill off all the birds.”
I gapped at her. “But, but the sparrows, and the parakeets, and…” I stammered. “And the Flamingos…What about the Flamingos?”
She nodded sadly. “Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid they’d have to go, too.” She brightened up. “All of them”, she smiled.
“And peacocks and what about American Bald Eagles?”
“Well, I’d say we could keep a few in preserves but, why risk it?” She thought a moment. “No, kill them all. It’s them or us.”
I mulled her idea over for several days, wondering over the horror of it all. Surely, it was madness, a be-feathered clucking, version of Dante’s Inferno, Bosch after too much KFC, an avian holocaust the likes of which has not been seen since the extinction of the Dinosaurs.
The Word is that we’ll be hit by this sometime very soon. Then I heard This-

IT’S THEM OR US

So, how do we go about killing off all the birds around? Well, surely, there must be some way to collect millions of eggs and incubate them. They could be checked for disease before being hatched. Hell, we could breed clean birds, making sure that they’re disease free.
“If there is enough time to do that, then, sure,” she said, when I told her. “”Otherwise, we can just kill them all and call it Collateral Damage.” My Mother said. “What was it they said about that village in Viet Nam? “We had to destroy the village to save it”? It’s the same thing.”
The more I read about how bad this pandemic could get, due to migratory habits and patterns of these things, as well as the potential mutations and the effects on humans, and I think I’m starting to agree. As she said…”It’s them or us”.
Ideas?