I just caught myself doing something extremely odd; something that I’ve done habitually for years. It’s in the general class of little quirks which we tend to notice especially in generations older than us. I suspect that’s because the original underlying cause of their habit is obscured by time and “progress” and made to seem all the more out-of-place as a consequence.

My specific quirk concerns those plastic rings which hold together multipacks of cans and bottles. Whenever I’m about to dispose of one, I always take a pair of scissors and snip through every closed loop in the plastic so that none of them are joined together. I can remember very clearly why I do this, although I couldn’t tell you when it started.

At some point in the past, I heard a story about scavenger birds (seagulls and the like) who were getting their heads caught in the loops of plastic can-holders and then slowly choking themselves to death. I believe that the story specifically mentioned cutting the loops apart to avoid their suffering. I wouldn’t class myself as a rampant “animal lover” exactly, but something about the story hit home. Et voila, many years later I find myself standing in my kitchen cutting up plastic rings. Each time I do it, I remember the original story and ponder its veracity, even as I snip snip snip away.

The really crazy thing is that I then hopefully deposit the plastic in with the recycling, telling myself “well, I snipped it in case they reject and landfill it regardless.”

I fully expect, many years from now, to be standing in some kitchen snipping away whilst incredulous offspring or offspring-offspring (should such people ever exist) ask me “why the heck are you doing that?”

“Seagulls, dear. Seagulls.”

I’m not even particularly fond of seagulls…

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 10:49 pm .
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There are thousands of articles on this very subject all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to sell you little blue pills, 26% of them lead inevitably to a badly-researched, logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are, like this one, of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).