Every so often, there’ll be a local event where people release helium ballons. Invariably, there’ll be a letter to the editor about how dangerous this is to some poor unsuspecting animal who might eat it and die. However, I’ve never seen any real reports on this.
I’m not advocating the random killing of animals. but is this just an urban legend or is there some hard data to support this? This also applies to six-pack rings, I guess.
Googling does not turn up anything either.
I can’t speak to the danger-to-animals aspect, but what goes up must come down. I get annoyed when I find balloons littering my beach or yard with their deflated carcasses.
Don’t know much about ballons, though.
From Balloon - Wikipedia
I understand that an animal could be injured/killed, but does anybody have any solid numbers?
Animal protection services certainly say so. They base that on anecdotical evidence of many , many animals (mainly water fowls and other aquatic animals) found dead, choked on, or trapped on a piece of balloon, rubber or any other shard of plastic bag. It is entirely likely, given what ecologists know about feeding habits, that such shards look like pieces of waterplants or some other yummy thing to waterfowl, and they ingest them, causing all sorts of bowel obstructions leading to the animals death.
The problem with getting hard data about the actual danger of balloons ending up in nature, will be apparent if you think about it. How are you going to test how, exactly, dangerous ballons are, and how likely a ballon is to inconvenience, or kill, an animal? How would a scientific test to find that out be set up, and who would pay for such a test?
There is some more data about how plastics (and that may or may not apply to rubber) behave when they break down. Plastic just won’t break down biologically on its own. So whatever the danger a single shard of balloon rubber may pose to animals, keep in mind that it has several 100 years (estimates are about 450 years) to do its damage, again and again. Kill an animal, animal rots, shard gets released again, rinse, repeat. At first it may choke animals because of its sheer size. And after decades and decades of breaking down into smaller parts, it does its damage in other ways. This threaddescribes the MASSIVE amount of plastic shards that end up in the ocean (think a vortex of plastic soup estimated the size of Texas) and links to studies about what happens if the small shards of plastic end up in the food chain.
So, all in all, the risk of endangering animals by letting balloons fly wild may not be
that great, on a case by case basis. But it is certainly not imaginary. And why add to an existing problem? Sure, it is fun, but do we really NEED to let balloons fly, just for decorative purposes?
Haven’t found any yet. Just how reliable could it be? But this link has some more info on the subject:
http://www.longwood.edu/cleanva/balloons.htm
BTW, I found those links with a google search on “balloons hazard animal” (without the quotes). Google is amazingly good at finding what you want if you put enough clues in the search terms. It also heps to spel it rite!