I recently got married and this was, of course, by no means as straightforward as you think it ought to be. (My fiancé, BTW, is both the original inspiration and subsequent motivation for this blog. So, kudos or blame to her depending on which side you’re on. And for those thinking of gifts, we’ve registered a table here at our local Kaufhof in Not-Bielefeld.)
In most places except perhaps for Utah, a reasonable requirement for getting married is not being married. A more difficult requirement is proving that, especially when, like me, you’ve already been married. It actually shouldn’t be that tricky here in Germany. Unlike many (most? all?) Anglo-Saxon countries, Germany and many other European nations require you to register locally with the authorities. In so doing, they have all your important data: name, address, date of birth, marital status, number of children, name of your first dog, … In theory, it should be possible just to go to them with my passport (or personal ID) to prove who I am and they can “instantly” (that’s bureaucratically “instantly” as in Biblical “days”) see that I’m not married.
In theory …
Because I’m divorced and despite being listed in their electronic books as being divorced, I need to provide them with the divorce certificate to prove that I really am divorced and so able to re-marry. Doesn’t matter that the divorce happened a few admin doors down here in Not-Bielefeld. I need the divorce certificate. Even worse, I also need to provide the marriage certificate to which the divorce certificate applies to. Absolutely no idea why. You’d think that the divorce certificate, being the later and therefore the more relevant of the two documents, would suffice to show that I’m not married. But, apparently I have to prove that I was married to prove that I am divorced to prove that I’m not married to prove that I am able to marry again. And they say marriage can be rough sometimes …
Comes the problem: I didn’t have a copy of the marriage certificate and didn’t really want to ask my ex-wife for one. Comes another problem: my marriage was in faraway Not-Not-Bielefeld. (And that is not a double negative to indicate that the marriage was indeed in Bielefeld. Because Bielefeld doesn’t exist, my marriage wouldn’t either. Which, now in hindsight, would have reduced the paperwork tremendously …) Now, if the marriage officials here in Not-Bielefeld can’t ask their colleagues in the neighbouring divorce department for information, they sure aren’t going to be able to do it with their colleagues in Not-Not-Bielefeld.
Amazingly enough, however, and as the exception that proves the rule (and was nearly the ruin of this blog), I could actually order the marriage certificate from Not-Not-Bielefeld online just by entering the appropriate, detailed information about myself and the wedding that any competent identity thief would have at hand.
After pinching myself nearly to death (twice because for some quite unknown reason that might actually support the existence of God, I also didn’t have to supply any documentation about my previous Canadian marriage and divorce), the only other thing was my Canadian birth certificate. Although I do have a German passport, one of the requirements for which is being born, and although I’m listed in their electronic books as being born, I still have to prove this beyond simply standing in front of the admin type. And in German. Now, Canada might be officially bilingual, but not when it comes to German and I also come from a part of Canada that tries its best to forget about them having to be officially bilingual. So, my birth certificate is in English. All shiny and glossy like those crap certificates you got for Best Attendance in elementary school, but still in English. Fortunately, however, I already had an official (and expensive) translation of it because of my previous marriage in Not-Not-Bielefeld. (Apparently, being born is very important for getting married anywhere in Germany.)
(At this point, I should mention that getting divorced in Germany, apart from the expensive lawyers, is a far less painful procedure. That I recall, I never had to produce any of this kind of documentation to get divorced. Ok, maybe my ex-wife had to present the marriage certificate that I didn’t have, but I never had to prove that I was born, for instance.)
In the end, I presented all my documents as well as all the translated, authenticated ones of my fiancée in absentia. All that was done with them was to check that they were all there. Not that they were real or accurate or properly translated, just there. Folder open, mostly unread papers filed, folder closed. Could be that they checked them over at their leisure at some later date. Could be that they didn’t.
In any case, did I mention that German admin loves paper?
A long time ago in a part of Germany far, far away …
… comes this little gem.
But, as usual, some background first …
The first bit is that many Germans are awfully impressed by academic titles and Germany offers an impressive number of academic titles to be awfully impressed by. You see, a PhD in Germany isn’t just a PhD and it comes in over 50 different flavours. A doctorate in the natural sciences is not just a doctorate, for instance, but officially a Doctor rerum naturalium or, for short, Dr. rer. nat. (Germans love abbreviations too. But, given some of the words they are regularly confronted by, they have to.)
(Ok. Most PhDs have specializations. It’s not as if I know anything much about medieval English literature (or literature from any period, period) and would never try to pass myself off as an expert on it with my doctorate. However, very few have semi-mandatory, Latinized specializations. Mine doesn’t (in fact, it doesn’t list any specialization) and my alma mater has been the living embodiment of pomp and circumstance for literally centuries now.)
(The love affair with academic titles is actually so strong here in Germany that there are actually more than a few Dr. Dr.s running around the country for those people who have completed two doctorates for some bizarre, unknown reason. Got a professorship? Throw that it there as well to make Prof. Dr. Dr. And, although it’s not an academic title, you can even add your gender up front to make Frau (or Herr) Prof. Dr. Dr.)
The second bit of background is that Germany is one of a few countries that allow their citizens to have their academic titles listed on their passports and ID cards and driver’s licenses. Having found this out shortly after moving to Germany (and also being a German citizen; thanks, dad), I naturally had to do it as well. This was, I admit, motivated by equal measures narcissism and envy. The narcissism part I hope is clear. The envy comes from my wife at the time having Dr. rer. nat. Schmidt on her passport (not her real last name, unless she’s remarried someone named Schmidt in the meantime) and I wanted to officially be a “rare nut” as well.
(It should, however, go without saying that any form of narcissism does potentially have its price, even in the case of a few small letters like this. Having your doctor title on your passport is pretty darn impressive until the stereotypical announcement comes through asking if there is a doctor on board the plane. Lufthansa employees probably understand the many medical limits a Dr. rer. nat. has. Air Canada ones definitely will not.)
So, off I go to the local city hall, documents in hand, ready to feed my narcissism and quell my envy. The admin type looked everything over and told me to come back in a week or so. One very long week later I returned and was told that it all was “Not Possible”. Because my PhD was not a German PhD, no one would know which German flavour it was equivalent to. What if someone was looking for a Dr. iur. (law) but instead got this “rare nut”? Two very (very) different things entirely. What could be done, however, was one or the other of the following, equally grotesque options that all the many foreign medical doctors here in Germany seem to be forced to use (forced if only because I can’t see them actually wanting to use it):
Dr. (University of Not-In-Germany) Me Myself I
or
Me Myself I, PhD (University of Not-In-Germany)
On the surface, the rationale behind the rejection sort of makes sense, even to me. But, here’s the thing. Even though Germans have 50+ different flavours of PhD, they hardly, if ever, use them. Except for the poor medical doctors, it’s really just Dr. this or Dr. that. Even the passport of my then wife just said “Dr. Schmidt”. (So that joke about the Lufthansa versus Air Canada employees? Pretty much pure unbridled artistic license. The reality is that the Lufthansa employees would be equally clueless from my passport as to just how clueless I am medically when it involves anything more complicated than a single Band-Aid. (Which would include two Band-Aids.))
Even though the grotesqueness of either solution had a vague sadistic appeal to it (what would English-speaking people think when they saw my passport?), I decided on remaining plain old “Mr.” for reasons of common decency. But hope sprang anew a few short months later …
In the meantime, you see, I had gotten my professorship here in Not-Bielefeld. A German professorship. Forget Dr. rer. nat. (without the rer. nat.), I was now taking my quest one step further up the narcissism ladder. How could they possibly refuse? Like I said, it was a German professorship. So, same city hall, same same desk, same admin type. Same general request on my side too and same general, initial answer of come back in a week or so.
Unfortunately, same final answer too: “Not Possible”.
The reason this time around is that Professor (like Herr or Frau) is not an academic title in Germany, but merely an academic rank (unlike Herr or Frau) and fundamentally no different than, say, Student Assistant. A job title in other words. Once I retire, I go back to being a plain old doctor. (Sort of. Retirement for professors in slightly odd in Germany in the sense that we don’t retire until we ultimately do, if you know what I mean. Like in North America, we do mutate into a Professor emeritus (another academic rank), but we keep drawing a “retirement salary” instead of a true pension. (Want to make this really confusing? This retirement salary in German is called a “Pension”, which looks exactly like the English pension (but only when it starts a sentence). The analogue of the English pension in German, however, is “Rente”. All sort of like how an English billion is not a German one, with or without the leading capital.)) And passports and other official, personal documents only list academic titles, not academic ranks. (Unlike bank cards, with mine proudly proclaiming my ego-feeding status as Prof. Dr.)
But …
Suddenly, it now was possible to have Dr. listed on all my personal documents. Not Dr. (University of Not-In-Germany), just plain old simple Dr. (University of Not-In-Germany). And, as is usually the case in admin matters such as this, I have absolutely no idea why. In getting my professorship, as was just pointed out to me, all I gained was an academic rank. My foreign, flavourless doctorate remained the exact same foreign, flavourless doctorate it was before. The admin type also remained the same admin type and should have known all this given that this was not the biggest of city halls or the biggest of time intervals. (How big wasn’t the city hall? Put it this way: two desks and no machine to pull a number from. That big.)
Sometimes it’s actually better not to question admin, so I took the offer and ran. Narcissism must be fed after all. In retrospect, however, I can honestly say though that having these few extra letters on my personal documents has impressed exactly no one that I wanted it to. I’ve never been bumped to first class because of it nor to the front of any line anywhere.
But then, I’ve also never had to answer the call of whether there is a doctor on board either …
In a stunning bid to catch up with the 20th century, my University here in Not-Bielefeld mandated that from last Autumn onwards all examination administration was to be done online only. Paper-free exam administration as the name proudly proclaims. As an amateur technoweenie, I found the idea great. Nothing like a bit of superfluous technology to replace a system that’s working just fine as it is. And you know the replacement solution has to be great because it’s literally been in development for at least 10 years now that I know of.
But first a bit of background …
The working system as it stands is that each of my courses is organized as a module that can contain one or more classes. At the end of each semester, I tally up the grades for all the different exams in a module in Excel, print out the results including the final grade, duly sign the summary, and send it to the examination office where they enter the grades manually into the system.
Room for improvement? Obviously. After all, we’re talking about a system where electronic grades are converted to paper grades that are then converted back to electronic grades. Kind of a waste of time and effort, especially on the back end.
Enter paper-free exam administration. Ten plus years in the making to sort everything out.
On paper (if you’ll pardon the pun), it is indeed a wonderful idea. Instead of all this unnecessary digital to analogue to digital back-and-forth, we all just enter the grades directly into the University’s online teaching system and click to automatically and instantaneously send them directly to the examination office who then can also automatically and instantaneously publish the official grades to the students. German efficiency has never been so, well, efficient.
But, like I said, on paper …
There’s any number of problems with the system. For starters, students have to register online for each exam. And, every year, there’s at least one student who forgets to do this and so has to be added manually. I also have to manually enter each exam into the system and wait for it to be approved by the examination office. There’s also no way that I can see to differentially weight the different exams in a course. Or to include different grading schemes in a single exam summary. Or to carry over exams from previous years because some students didn’t complete the module in a single year. Or …
But, to be fair, they’ve only had about 10 years to iron out little cosmetic glitches like these.
(Now, I would like to explicitly, if parenthetically, emphasize that I’m not simply griping after the fact. Griping? Absolutely. But not after the fact. I did point out most of these shortcomings to the person in charge of the system this past summer when the system was not yet mandatory. The response, apparently, was to simply ignore my e-mail, and box the system pretty much as is through the University’s decision-making hierarchy.)
And then comes the kicker: the only thing paper-free in Not-Bielefeld in 2020 were the toilet-paper sections in most supermarkets during the height(s) of the coronavirus pandemic.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, German bureaucracy lives and dies with paper, with the corollary that trees live to die for German admin. I can click all the buttons I want, but, for it all to be valid in the end, I still have to print out the grades for each exam from the online system, duly sign each summary, and send each piece of paper to the examination office. Deja voodoo anyone?
A key, repeated word in the previous paragraph was “each”. We’re no longer talking about just a single piece of paper like in the good old days, but potentially many. For example, for a module with three exams, I now need to print out three pieces of paper and send them all in. Some really complex math using this example will hopefully highlight this subtlest of contradictions when it comes to the term “paper-free”. (Bear with me or hold tight. Your choice.)
Old, environmentally unfriendly system: one piece of paper.
New, paper-free system: three pieces of paper.
Net saving: minus two?
In other words, instead of printing out no pieces of paper whatsoever anymore in the new paper-free system (which, naively, is what one would expect from the name), I still have to print out at least one (breakeven) and possibly many more (breakdown). Which marketing genius (and simultaneous mathematical wanker) thought up this moniker?
In the end, paper-free exam administration really amounts to nothing more than getting the teaching staff to take on more of the work of the admin types. IT “solutions” very often are of more benefit to the admin types than the end users after all. You can understand it though. I certainly don’t like spending my time doing admin.
But then maybe that’s why I became a teacher (and former researcher) and left the admin to the admin types …
This entry probably deals more with bureaucracy (a system) than admin (the people and institutions indentured to that system) per se, but I’m hoping that only admin types (together with their lawyers, both of whom I’m also hoping aren’t reading this blog) would take me to task for this.
(More to the point: my blog, my rules …)
After being a lifelong, devout cat person, I took over a nine-year-old female Australian Shepherd mix some two years ago now. (Although there is a very legitimate and accepted term for“female dog”, even I’m not crazy enough in this day and age to use it here. (And, if you think that word is bad, look up the one for an adult female dog of reproductive age, which to me sounds like one of the greatest sounding insults of all time.)) Having owned cats for a number of years, I thought it would be equally simple with a dog, with the notable exception that the dog would actually care what I said: feed the dog regularly, clean up its poop, and take it to the vet every once in a while. (A strategy which, come to think about it, worked pretty well with my kids too.)
Nope …
At least here in Germany, if not in many other places, it’s nowhere near that simple: you need to officially register your dog, officially pay taxes for your dog, and officially take out special third-party liability insurance for your dog. And, just because it’s so much fun the first time around, you have to officially register your dog twice. Duly and properly registered here in Not-Bielefeld doesn’t cut it and you also have to do it provincially. No one tells you about this (definitely not Not-Bielefeld and God forbid they do it on your behalf) and the provincial authority in charge of it definitely does zero advertising about it, so most dog owners don’t know about it. I only found out by accident over a year after I got my dog, but the only time most dog owners will find out about it is when their singly-registered dog is involved in some kind of accident and they have to pay a penalty of up to 10 000 EUR because it should have been doubly-registered.
And all that is just on the dog side of things. Dog owners also have to have a doggie driver’s license to prove that they can properly navigate their dog or something. As always, I am not making this up and not least in that it really is called a dog driver’s license. (I actually managed to sidestep the license because I took my dog over from my best friend. The fine print attached to the license indicated that it was only mandatory for first-time dog owners or, more importantly, for first-time human owners for the dog. In any case, Not-Bielefeld took my registration money without questions and I wasn’t giving any extra answers.)
It’s not just the admin types who have it against dogs, but often the general public as well. It never ceases to amaze me how often I get told to put my dog on a leash, even though this isn’t required in most of Not-Bielefeld. Ok, I understand leashes and can see when they’re necessary. But, with my dog that’s hardly ever the case. Australian Shepherds are renowned “velcro dogs” (in a non-pathological way) and mine, snoring at my feet as I type this, is usually never further than five meters away from me. We’re usually out and about here in the suburbs, which here in Not-Bielefeld are the very definition of not hectic. She always stays on the sidewalk and doesn’t chase after birds or cats or postal carriers, although squirrels à la Pixar’s Up!are admittedly sometimes touch-and-go. I’m always constantly looking out for her (and cops) and she tends to listen very obediently when I get her out of the way of bicycles, joggers, or postal carriers and especially postal carriers on bicycles. (I should point out that my dog being so well trained has absolutely nothing to do with me. I got her that way. Being part Australian Shepherd also makes her the smarter of the two of us. By half.) Even so, I always have her leash with us and do put her on it when it’s crowded, chaotic, or otherwise dangerous either for her or those around us. Like I said, I get it.
Anyway, what never ceases to amaze me even more are some of the answers I get when I respond asking why I should put her on a leash. Four of the better ones:
Because dogs are potentially dangerous.
The obvious one, right?
No question about it: dogs have those big teeth and some dogs like to use them. But, admin has its bite too. In the UK, it’s estimated that there are about 740 dog attacks per 100 000 people each year. (Amazingly, the equivalent stats are not available for Germany.) This makes dogs about half as dangerous as admin, with a reported office injury rate in the UK of 1334 cases per 100 000 employees. (And that’s only to the admin-types themselves, not the recipients of their handiwork.) But, you never hear about anyone talking about putting admin on a short leash, now do you?
Because my dog finds it unfair that yours runs around without a leash. (As relaxed as most dog owners are, this one still comes up a lot.)
Wait. What? Really?!
I won’t bet the farm on this one (even if I had one), but I’m pretty darn certain that dogs don’t have a sense of justice and not just because they tend to be cool with pretty much everything. (Cats, on the other hand, very definitely do. They usually find most things to be hideously unfair to them.) But, on the oddball chance that they did, then wouldn’t my well-trained dog find it unfair in reverse to have to wear a leash because your badly trained one can’t go without one?
Because of the Hinterlassenschaften.
Hinterlassenschaften (which people here really do say; did I ever mention that Germans like big, long words?) is a euphemism that vaguely translates out as “objects that are left behind” or, in plain ol’, George-Carlin-approved English, crap. (In this context. It can also refer to what deceased people leave behind for their relatives. But that also might be crap.) My normal response here is to stare at the person all bewildered and ask them all surprised if that means that my dog won’t crap anymore when she’s on a leash. (Except that I don’t say crap. And I definitely don’t say Hinterlassenschaften.)
Because of the Brut- und Setzzeit.
The Brut- und Setzzeit is a multi-month period beginning each April during which special measures are taken to ensure that wild animals (but mostly birds here in the city) have a chance to raise their offspring in relative peace and quiet. Again, I get this. Cities are screwing up life for most wild animals so that some (any) form of compensation is desperately needed. What I don’t get is that the restrictions also don’t apply to cats. (And explicitly not so.) Or joggers. Or bicyclists. Or pretty much anything other than dogs who, for some reason, have to be chained up within an inch of their owners over the course of these many, many months.
No, seriously. Many dogs, especially the hunting breeds, will eat birds, no question. But many others won’t. (Mine included. If it isn’t some over-priced, former meat product of questionable quality (or human junk food of even more questionable quality) out of a plastic bag, she’s just not interested.) But, really, which is the far bigger threat to a bird, especially the fat, fuzzy ones that can’t fly yet, a ground-dwelling dog or a tree-climbing cat? (Just to help you along here, it’s estimated that outdoor cats (including strays) kill about 2.4 billion birds per year in the United States alone. Even if that estimate is off by a factor of 10, that’s still nearly one bird for each American citizen each year or about what the much more polite Canadian cats eat each year. And that’s just birds.) Here in Not-Bielefeld, they also have at least one annual race that takes place in a wooded area right in the middle of the Brut- und Setzzeit. But, apparently birds, like mothers in maternity wards everywhere, don’t get their feathers in a twist when hundreds, if not thousands, of joggers careen past them. Nevertheless, the inviolability of the Brut- und Setzzeit is so unquestionably ingrained here in Germany that people have stopped to scold me about my dog running off-leash when we’re walking along a relatively busy road.
I’m not trying to argue that dogs are angels. Not in the least. (Except mine. Of course.) But, if your stated goal is to protect wildlife, then being at least remotely consistent about it is not a bad place to start.
What I guess I don’t understand here in general is why dogs always seem to be getting the short end of the administrative stick. The Brut- und Setzzeit story is just an extreme example of it. Less extreme, but more general examples are that dogs are not allowed to go off-leash in most parks and woods in and around Not-Bielefeld and they are absolutely forbidden on school grounds at any time. (Even at eight in the evening in the middle of the holidays when there’s zero students and even fewer teachers around.) By contrast, cats can do whatever they please. However, cats, being cats, will always do whatever they damn well please anyway. They don’t need government support for this and, being cats, really don’t care either if they get it or not. But we give it to them anyways: in late 2019, the EU executive reiterated that its policy of freedom of movement extends to cats, supporting their “unalienable right to roam”and effectively killing any thought of a cat leash law in Europe. Those are 2.4 billion American birds, after all. Fine, but how about maybe a cat “little bell around the neck” law?
But, then, even when the system actually tries to help dogs, it still somehow goes wrong.
For instance, during the coronavirus pandemic in Summer 2020, the German government found the time to debate a proposed law for 2021 mandating that dog owners had to walk their dogs for at least an hour at least twice a day. Ok, as serious and awful as the pandemic still is, it’s not the absolute end of the world (numbers-wise we’re still way behind the 1918 Spanish Flu and the world didn’t end then either) and normal, day-to-day life still has to continue. But, you’d think it would be a bigger priority for the government to discuss some financial aid to the restaurateurs and artists and the many other segments of the society that were really hit hard by the pandemic instead of telling these same people how often they need to walk their dogs each day (or else). I mean, they’re all out of business now anyway because the government is prioritizing Hinterlassenschaften like this. What else do they have to do besides walk their dogs?
Again, the reasoning behind all this is perfectly understandable. Dogs need their exercise, even if they’re roped up and denied the freedom of movement cats have while doing so. But why does it have to be legislated and not just, say, recommended? The second it becomes a law, you have to decide on rigid limits for it as well as how to enforce it. (The impossibility of the latter usually forms the key argument against any sort of law designed to herd in cats.) And, by limits, I mean this two times one hour per day. A lot of people have already made a lot of good counterarguments here. For instance, two hours a day might be too much for some older dogs and an hour outside in the baking hot summer humidity is not ideal for human nor beast. And, my own take on this, what if the dog just plain and simple doesn’t want to? My dog is great at this and she’s part Australian Shepherd (albeit an older one now), a breed that needs activity. Sometimes when I think we’re going out for a long walk, she’ll just go halfway down the block, leave her little Hinterlassenschaften behind (which is sort of a bilingual repetitive redundancy, I think) and that’s it. Really. That’s. It. She’ll just sit there on the sidewalk channelling her inner cat, pointing her snout skywards and will not budge until I turn around and start heading for home again. And this doesn’t just happen when the weather here in Not-Bielefeld is at its winter’s finest: cold (well, cool, says this Canadian), dark, drizzly, … Nope. She’ll do it in lovely T-shirt weather in the summer too. Now, how do I explain that to the cops? Or to the neighbours? Or to whoever is supposed to be keeping tabs on how often and how long we go for walks each day?
But, to mix clichés, it would seem that a dog’s life is not the cat’s meow …
My university here in Not-Bielefeld, on the whole, has taken a careful, considered, and thoughtful approach to the whole coronavirus pandemic. (And to those people who are already screaming that I should be writing “COVID-19”, don’t ever let me hear you refer to “the flu” or “influenza”, ok?) One could only wish that most governments had reacted the same way. Since Spring 2020, most of the University has had to work from home and any actual physical presence in the University was kept to an essential, bare minimum in a balance between the needs of the students and the current threat of the pandemic. Given the use of the word “essential”, it should be clear that most admin types were working from home.
There is, however, an inherent problem to the latter. German bureaucracy is not exactly designed for the 21st century. And, come to think about it, not really for the 20th century either. It’s all paper based, you see. Every important and not-so-important document has to be printed out; otherwise, it doesn’t count. Electronic documents? No way.
But, don’t ever let it be said that the wheels of German bureaucracy don’t grind with stereotypical German efficiency. Although virtually the entire University had been working from home since Spring 2020, it took until Autumn 2020 for a directive to finally be issued that allowed University employees to print documents on their home printers. Equally mind boggling to the fact that it (only) took six months for this permission to be granted were some of the mandatory conditions under which home printing could only occur:
Documents categorized as “for your eyes only” could not be printed at home.
(Ok, fair enough. There are things such as data privacy and we don’t want all our personal information spilling out into the public domain like this. That’s what Facebook and social media more generally are for. But what information could the University possibly be bunkering (on us) that requires double-0 status to read?)
All documents were to be retrieved from the printer immediately (if not sooner).
All documents were to be kept under lock and key.
Again, I understand things like data privacy. But, I sincerely hope that most admin types aren’t married to dubious foreign agents (with “foreign” here meaning an evil nation outside of Germany or even an evil university outside of Not-Bielefeld) or ruthless identity thieves eager to get their hands on such privileged information. (Or are raising their kids (or pets) to be one or the other.) Most normal people actually go running at the mere hint of these kinds of documents.
In any case, you do have to wonder what all the admin types were doing for those six months without any printing privileges …
Old, environmentally unfriendly system: one piece of paper.
No, seriously. Many dogs, especially the hunting breeds, will eat birds, no question. But many others won’t. (Mine included. If it isn’t some over-priced, former meat product of questionable quality (or human junk food of even more questionable quality) out of a plastic bag, she’s just not interested.) But, really, which is the far bigger threat to a bird, especially the fat, fuzzy ones that can’t fly yet, a ground-dwelling dog or a tree-climbing cat? (Just to help you along here, it’s estimated that outdoor cats (including strays) kill about 
The Blog About Fog 