ABSTRACT
The Great Leap Forward in China established a slogan ‘Wipe Out the Four Pests’ – rats, sparrows, flies and mosquitoes – and in May 1958 Mao Zedong urged the ‘whole people, including five-year-old children’ to mobilize against them. Sparrows ate grain. Villages, including entire schools, went out to knock down sparrow nests, break eggs and kill nestlings. Populations coordinated with military precision to beat gongs and cooking pots at every spot where sparrows were trying to roost in the evenings over several days, until the sparrows were exhausted. In some areas, sparrow populations were almost eliminated for years. After Chinese scientists pointed out that sparrows also eat insects and are themselves useful for pest control, sparrows were removed from the list. 1 The naturalist Flora Thompson, writing in the 1920s, described how villagers in England similarly used to gather under rookeries in spring, with guns, slings, beer and much conviviality, for a morning of population control and sport. They shot or stoned the fledglings who could not yet fly into a heap of mangled corpses under the trees while the parent rooks circled helplessly above. 2
