The Chinese government believed that the tens of thousands of sparrows ate as much as ten pounds of grain every year. Where they got this information is unclear, and their methods to address it would be devastating. The Chinese communists enlisted the entire population of China to hunt sparrows and kill them in a war of extermination. Millions of people subsequently left their homes and began destroying sparrow nests, breaking eggs, and killing chicks. They organized themselves into separate groups and began to herd sparrows into places they could either be destroyed or denied rest. Sparrows soon lost any quarter inside China, and were forced to keep moving by Chinese people banging pans together to deny them any rest. Sparrows that weren’t killed directly would drop dead from exhaustion. Eventually, they could only go where Chinese people were unable to follow.
China’s plan worked. The sparrows were nearing the point of extinction when one scientist finally got the message through Mao’s thick head that sparrows earned the ten pounds of grain they ate. These birds ate more than grain: they ate pestilent insects too, insects that would otherwise destroy China’s crops if the predatory birds weren’t keeping them in check.Without the sparrows feeding on them, insects like locusts destroyed a lot of Chinese crops, dropping crop yields to record lows. Since Mao and his disastrous plans like the Great Leap Forward had already been massive ecological disasters, the crop yields were sunk even further by droughts and floods.The result was the 1960 Great Chinese Famine, the deadliest man-made famine ever recorded, killing 55 million people. Mao ended the war against the sparrows and declared bed bugs to be the new “fourth pest.” In the end, Mao had to import 250,000 sparrows from the USSR to replenish the sparrows and end the locust population’s devastating effect.
Not exactly the same but along the same lines. Government. Why do people still give them attention?
