Urban Bunghole of the Year: Joanna Lennig
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
No, it’s not Lurch from The Addams Family. It’s piece-of-shit yuppie Joanna Lennig, The Urban Elitist’s first-ever Urban Bunghole of the Year.
This ugly rat face (apologies to rats) wins the award not for using the painfully annoying term “wow factor,” nor for descending into the laughably idiotic depths of self-parody with her “tree branch on the Volvo” simile.
Rather, Lennig, who will one day die prematurely and painfully of a well-deserved terminal disease, wins the award for capturing and drowning squirrels to protect the precious rooftop garden of her brownstone.
Joanna Lennig is an executive headhunter who lives in Brooklyn but grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. As a 10-year-old she was stunned to see her mother, “an incredibly polite, retiring, WASP lady,” attacking a woodchuck in the vegetable garden with a shovel.
Ms. Lennig herself has no sentimental attachment to squirrels. About three years ago she saw signs of digging in the rooftop garden of her brownstone, which has pots of blueberry bushes, grape vines, tomatoes and peppers, as well as flowering plants, and is a regular stop on garden tours. She was unconcerned by this evidence of squirrel interlopers until the day she went up to find the garden destroyed, the blueberry bush razed, the tomato plants eaten through.
“There was a wow factor,” Ms. Lennig says. “Like when one looks out at the aftermath of a really, really, really destructive thunderstorm and says, ‘Look at that tree branch on the Volvo.’ ” Ms. Lennig went “straight to rage.” She and her husband bought a Havahart trap and captured a squirrel, then realized they did not have a plan. Transporting it to a nearby park didn’t seem an effective solution. Squirrels, they had heard, were territorial; it would only come back.
They did, however, as conscientious environmentalists, have a large rain barrel on the roof, which they used to water the garden. Who first came up with the idea of drowning, Ms. Lennig cannot recall, but it was her husband who handled the first executions. The trap, which was long and narrow, fit perfectly in the barrel.
Ms. Lennig has yet to be able to deal with the removal of the corpse, which is then thrown into the garbage. But she and her husband are now so comfortable with this form of pest control that when they visited Ms. Lennig’s in-laws at their lakefront property last year, where squirrels were climbing on the deck and ravaging the planters, they offered to drown them.
The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) unconditionally condemns drowning as a method of killing. Their Panel on Euthanasia has concluded, “Drowning is not a means of euthanasia and is inhumane.” But you already know that, as does Lennig. A “sentimental attachment to squirrels” is not required to understand that they are capable of the same terror and suffering as any other animal (including humans).
Since squirrels are incapable of bringing about a proper retribution, I wonder if any humans will take up the cause? Against violence as a matter of principle, I’m certainly not promoting such a thing. But I do wonder how Lennig might react if a gang of humans in squirrel costumes were to ambush her on a dark street and plunge her grotesque face into a bucket of cold water for perhaps ten or twenty seconds?
We all know Al Gore really, really cares about global warming (even more than he cares about himself maybe!). But why doesn’t Fat Albert ever mention that the meat industry generates 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, SUVs, ships, and planes in the world combined? Perhaps it’s because his mouth is so often full of some decomposing corpse!