I don’t know about everyone else here but it seems to me that the article concerning a fish protective security system is about the stupidest thing I have ever heard of in my life!!! The following ideas are why I think this would suck big time:
Your liability would be beyond immense!
Burglars suffering from a lack of urine control? Please!
Burglars going barefoot through a fenced in moat around a house they probably watched for awhile. I don’t know
you but I’d just use a wood canoe.
I have serious doubts that all these fish would take
bother you at all unless they were starving to death.
Pirahna are seriously over exaggerated in my opinion!
Candiru??? Don’t even get me started on that load of horse shtuff!
Anyone else see other problems?
Aside from the practicality of a moat, you seem to disagree with the tales of candiru invading bodily orifices?
I dunno, it just doesn’t seem that unlikely to me, given the bizaare habits of Amazonian parasites…
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).
Cecil blew it when he assumed the writers proposing a “fish-based security system for the South Pacific” were serious (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/000519.html) Look at the authors’ names - Hugh Dunnit and Boompsadaisy. Then poke around the web sight Cecil referenced and eventually come to http://www.spc.org.nc/coastfish/Reports/misc/wp99/wp99.htm, the “just for fun” page. There is usually a joke paper, The famous “Working Paper 99”, submitted each year to the SPC Regional Technical Meetings on Fisheries and in 1995 it was “On the introduction of exotic freshwater fish species to the South Pacific.”
Yeah, come on, didn’t anyone read the names of the people who wrote the piece on “fish security”?
SPC/Insh Fish Man/WP.99
5 July 1995
On the introduction of exotic freshwater
fish species to the South Pacific
by Hugh Dunnit & Hans Kneesun-Boompsadaisy
Goliath Consultants Inc
Upper Choirboy, Hampshire
England
and another thing… cecil claims that he said the article was “apparently serious” not “was serious”. interesting distinction, i say. “apparently”, cecil hates to be wrong, even on the super-trivial stuff.