Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22926 – 1013

Here’s the haps:

The bird feeders were empty so I went to the store to buy more bird seed. A simple, straightforward mission easily accomplished. I came home with this:

And then I zoomed in on this:

My initial reaction was to laugh at the silliness of it but then I wondered what in the world its purpose was. I know a lot of these labels are born out of lawsuits. Our coffee cups often say, “Warning: Contents may be hot.” This is because someone got burned by getting coffee spilled in their lap and filed a lawsuit against someone for making and serving a beverage that is supposed to be made and served hot, hot. There are more. I did a post last April about a couple I ran across.

I got to wondering about this particular warning, however, and how it might have come about.

“Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look at my poor client. How can you not have compassion for a man who has lost so much? Tens of thousands of dollars, gone! And why, you might well ask. Because this giant, greedy, malevolent, evil corporation purposely misled people. Inappropriately and insufficiently labeling their product. My client went out and spent all of his life’s savings, expecting in return a bumper crop of cardinals and goldfinches but instead wound up with nothing because even though he thought, as the label said, he was buying birdseed and worked all the Spring planting season, he was, in fact, buying bird feed!”

And that’s how the warning label, “For Bird Feeding” came about.

I am still wildly curious about how this one came about, though: