Obsession - Not by CK

The weird and rather disturbing world of lost-the-plot obsessives wanting something, the object of their desires, so bad that they'll steal it or buy it from someone who has stolen it to sell on, even to order. Plants, wildlife and bird eggs, fish etc, the rarer the better, even the last of its kind, a few must have them, and will do anything to get them. People in some very dark, destructive personal places, I reckon.

The plant crime of the century | Sam Knight | News | The Guardian


PS - I have just remembered an infamous case from a few years ago, so too will keen flytyers. A young, wealthy, American classical music music student and brilliant flytyer (he had won prizes for his tyings of classic 19th Century salmon flies) hit the Natural History Museum's Tring branch and stole a collection of incredibly rare, I believe in some cases extinct, bird skins to sell to flytyers (I remember seeing an advert of his, selling single feathers of stuff long since gone, on a U.S. tying forum or similar, and thinking "What? That's impossible ... how did you get THAT?").

The case was all over the national and world press. Here is the outcome.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/...are-bird-theft-from-museum-at-tring93552.html

We really have become a nation of plant and fungi and fish rippers and movers and obsessive Bucket List tickers.

BBC Radio 4 programme, Costing The Earth - BBC Radio 4 - Costing the Earth, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

What we will collect, "do", tick off, boast about etc when its all gone?

"Oh, nothing worth doing now, of course, but I did kill / tick / collect the last..."?

Completely nuts (perhaps not, these are probably collectible or highly sellable now).

I don't give us long.

The world is not in a glass case, it is a living breathing evolving entity where things, species etc live and flourish for a few hours, days months years millenium or in the case of the dinosaurs 60 million years and then die to be replaced by the next dominant species.

The loss of one species of plant, bird, fish, insect etc is nothing when taken in that context and certainly not indicative of the end of the world.

Of course the world isn't forever set in some jar of aspic or formalin, but the way we're ripping what remains of its wild things at present, merely for here today, gone tomorrow profit and out of personal "Look what I've got" vanity does not bode well. But we Homo sapiens are masters at harrumphing "Things ain't what they used to be!" then blaming it on anything and anybody but ourselves.