By Robin Rix

Signs telling people not to feed birds in Nathan Phillips Square were suddenly installed and just as suddenly removed over the past week, reports the Toronto Star.
Torontoist thought the signs gave some pretty compelling reasons for their all-too-brief existence. Feeding birds distorts their nutrition, migration, and breeding patterns. Also, guano is a nuisance (as many bike and car owners will tell you) and a health hazard, even if in less than Dr. No-like quantities.
Yet the signs were removed. Why? Apparently, City officials were worried that they came across as being too negative, in that some people might resent being told what not to do. Those people who scatter bits of bread while chuckling maniacially? They have feelings too, you know. Less negative signs will be on their way…soon. This isn’t so much Hitchcockian as Kafkaesque.
Toronto may wish to look to London [England!] for inspiration, where Mayor Ken Livingstone went so far as to criminalize the feeding of birds in the city’s main square, Trafalgar Square, unless authorized by him personally. It dovetails (ahem) nicely with his overall strategy of improving access to public spaces. Bird numbers are down, people numbers are up, and everyone seems happy.
But what about those Londoners who scatter a loaf or two? Seems like they were won over by the fact that “scientific monitoring undertaken on a basis agreed in advance with supporters of the pigeons has confirmed that [the ban on feeding] has been achieved without cruelty to the birds.”
Might this be a lesson for our friends in City Hall: if you want to do something, begin by pre-emptively approaching and winning over the people most likely to oppose you?
Photo by Moonwire in the Torontoist Flickr Pool.