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This year has been unusually bad for houseflies. Or maybe good for them but bad for us. We try to keep a fly-swatter or folded newspaper always at the ready. But for the past few months, the newspaper has been pretty thin. On balance, I'd rather deal with the flies than with mice, raccoons, skunks or stinging insects like wasps and yellowjackets, but it's rather disconcerting finding a fly that's drowned itself in your beer. On the plus side: I was nearly finished my beer at the time, the fly died and presumably it died happy. But sometimes I'm truly perplexed by the human hierarchy of how we value, or don't value, the lives of the various animal species.

So far I haven't been served with a summons for causing unnecessary suffering to a house-fly. And unless I come across a fly with a funny white head, I doubt that I will. Still, I'm always reading stuff about attracting bees and other cute insects to your garden. I wonder where my rights leave off and those of other animal species assume priority?

In this summer of the plague, with human health and safety at risk, Bluesfest is holding drive-in concerts. If it helps even in a small way to salvage a major summer festival, then I guess more power to them. But this is far from the first disaster to befall Bluesfest.

Two years ago, Bluesfest narrowly escaped cancellation when killdeers decided to nest along a path right near where the Main Stage was to be set up. Well, turns out killdeers are endangered or threatened or somehow vulnerable as a species. Eventually organizers managed to safely move the nest, inch by inch or centimetre by centimetre until most of the nestlings hatched safely. I won't say outright that I oppose the approach they took, but I do sometimes find myself baffled by how various interest groups decide what's important and what isn't.

I should add here that I'm no great fan of Bluesfest (and in fact have yet to attend it), particularly since it eventually took over Folkfest (later Cityfolk) and made it a shadow of its former self. Not to mention how it always ran concurrently with Music and Beyond (which I've attended every year) and resulted in major parking problems (and in one case a car break-in - I think that was the night the Bluesfest stage blew down) in the downtown core.

I would also point out that I generally avoid harming other animals as much as is, well, humanly, possible. I don't eat meat; we ensured that no raccoons were harmed when they were evicted from our attic and when we needed mousetraps, we used the humane type (although our cat had other ideas). The aforementioned cat, though, admittedly is not fed a vegetarian diet. Cats just aren't designed that way!

One year, we managed to get yellowjackets (which resemble wasps or hornets, at least to a lay-person like me) in one of our backyard compost bins. I didn't perceive much sympathy on the part of those who are supposedly experts. Let them bee - or in this case yellowjacket - seemed to be the gist of it. But when you have curious small children and household pets who like to hang out in My Big Backyard... well, that's not a "solution" I was willing to contemplate. My partner tried turning a hose on the composter-contents at a point after sundown when they seemed relatively dormant - but to no avail. The solution that did finally work (though it took a full season) was to wrap a tarp around the infested composted to smother the creatures. Luckily we had a spare composted to use in the meantime.

So honestly, people. I know Nature as we personify it can seem cruel. But we're part of nature too and we're animals too. It's not against the law to kill animals for food as many people do, with the full knowledge of what we're doing. I say if we just take the time to weigh our options and guard against wanton bloodthirstiness, that's good enough for me.