Word: verminous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...European's mystical enthusiasm for the beasts. Farmers like the Kikuyu, the Embu and the Meru regard the wild animals as dangerous and destructive nuisances. Crop-raiding baboons are esteemed among African farmers about as highly as the coyote is admired among West Texas ranchers. They are considered vermin. Elephants passing through a Kikuyu shamba (small farm) one night can wipe out a farmer's profit for a year. The law forbids killing them. If the elephants and giraffes and lions pay for themselves by bringing in the tourists and their dollars, if they prove their worth, then perhaps...
...aquarium fish. Presumably there are extras such as doggy spas, rhinestone collars, pooper scoopers and what professionals in the domestic-animal world might call alternate-species entombment. The costs are proportionately staggering in the households of the European Community, home to an estimated 91 million nonhuman inhabitants, excluding unwelcome vermin...
...similarly, fail entirely to understand the scope of the problem It is no "bad taste" to degrade other people, nor is it "bad taste" to encourage vilent conquest as heterosexual intercourse In racist literature it is standard to portray the persecuted as bestial or subhuman to Nazis, Jews were "vermin," to the KKK Blacks are "apes." Such calculated dehumanization is essential to carrying out violence without guilty conscience. The Pi's references to women as "pigs" and "slobbering bovines" are not even remotely humorous, nor just in "bad taste"--they are dangerous...
...your introductory story on the Olympics [SPECIAL REPORT, Jan. 30] you refer to the vermin at the new Sarajevo Holiday Inn as a tribe of rats with the instincts of Albanian terrorists. This inexcusable and inaccurate reference to Albanians demonstrates your writer's insensitivity toward a people who have no historical reputation for terrorism...
...college sophomore's ear became a temporary roach motel last month when one of the monstrous vermin established residence there and had to be evicted by a doctor at St Luke's Hospital...