A vote for the blue mussel

Consider the blue mussel. (Re: The controversy over the red fox vs. Holstein as P.E.I.’s official animal.)

Amidst the firestorm of debate of a provincial animal, I dare nominate a third animal for the prestigious post.

While Holstein cows blow their horns and hook schoolchildren aside and try to kick their way to be the lead cow, let me observe that the Holstein cow in Charlottetown is roughly 5,000 km from her ancestral home in Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. Mussels have proven so popular in modern Island culture since they first displayed themselves on the market about 40 years ago, their export value to the P.E.I. economy is nearing $1.500,000,000 (one and one-half billion dollars) figuring a multiplier effect of 1.5 on landed value of about $1 billion dollars over the four decades.

Mussels are a study in personalities. When cool, they are frisky animals, rockin’ and rollin’ and bopping around in the tides. They come mainly in blue but some are even blond.

P.E.I.’s eminent mussel man, the original pioneer, and I once speculated on the character differences between the blues and the blonds. It is a gorgeous creature beyond compare when observed under the ice on a sunny winter day. Mother Nature feeds mussels, unlike cows which must be fed tonnes of all manner of cultivated foods so that they can fart and belch gases that disturb the environmentalist folks among us. On the other hand, mussels are cleaners, always cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, grooming themselves and filtering the fertile waters of P.E.I.’s bays.

Being afraid of Cows with Guns (google it) maybe I will, for my own safety, rescind my nomination of the blue mussel from the list of nominations after all and move a vote of confidence in the red fox, a widely distributed P.E.I. native. Maybe the bloated cow has disqualified itself, so we might have the result of a unanimous motion for Bugsy the Fox, should Bush Dumville forward it successfully from committee to the House.

Strength to the foxes of the forest.

Irwin Judson, Stratford