Multiplication of unlawful disjunctions
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Charles B. writes:
Apparently, birds are not considered wild animals by law. Reference here, where apparently feeding them in parks in permitted except if they are red masked parakeets:
SEC. 486. FEEDING BIRDS AND WILD ANIMALS PROHIBITED.
It shall be unlawful for any person to feed or offer food to any bird or wild animal in or on any sidewalk, street or highway of the City and County of San Francisco. It shall be unlawful to feed or offer food to any Red Masked Parakeet in any park of the City and County of San Francisco.
(Added by Ord. 268-64, App. 10/2/64; Ord. 133-07, File No. 070467, App. 6/15/2007)
The sign and the ordinance title have "birds and wild animals", while the body of the ordinance has "any bird or wild animal". And the ordinance specifies three (or four?) disjunctions within the scope of "unlawful": what you can't do ("feed or offer food"), who you can't do it to ("any bird or wild animal"), and where you can't do it "in or on any sidewalk, street or highway". Multiplying it all out, this gives 2x2x3 = 12 (or if we include "in or on", 2x2x2x3 = 24) specific prohibitions.
The uncertainty arises because the interaction of "in or on" with "any sidewalk, street or highway" is kind of fuzzy. It's fine to say that you can't feed any bird on any sidewalk, but it's unidiomatic at best to tell you not to do it in any sidewalk. And both "in any street" and "on any street" are plausible phrases, but they seem to mean almost the same thing. (Though maybe it matters whether it's the feeder or the food that's in or on the street…)
Anyhow, given that birds are biologically animals, and therefore non-pet birds are "wild animals", Charles relies on the Gricean Maxim of Quantity to infer that the San Francisco Police department adheres to a non-standard taxonomy of species. But it seems more likely that they're trying to avoid the misunderstandings that might arise if they left out the explicit prohibition again feeding birds.
And of course there's also the ambiguity of shall, though in this case the prescription of plainlanguage.gov to replace it with must doesn't work, since the subject is expletive it ("?It must be unlawful for any person…"). The Pennsylvania legislature (along with many other groups) uses plain old is in that context ("It is unlawful for any person …"), which is less fancy but clearer.
All in all, a good example of why legal drafting is hard.
I'll leave it to readers to tell us about the Red Masked Parakeets.
Jkw said,
July 22, 2025 @ 6:10 am
I searched for information about the red masked parakeets, expecting to find information about them being invasive and causing some kind of trouble. But all I could find was information about how they are all over San Francisco and most people never notice them.
https://www.sfenvironment.org/blog/spot-parakeet-near-you
This web page mentions they are not native to the area and that they prefer to nest in trees that are also not native. It points out that you aren't allowed to feed them in public places, but has no commentary on why. It also says they are struggling in their native environment and thriving in SF. It seems odd that they would be specifically called out in a law without also referencing other city birds like pigeons or sparrows. Perhaps at some point there was a city councilor who hated them for personal reasons.
Jerry Packard said,
July 22, 2025 @ 6:43 am
So I guess it would also apply to mosquitoes, ants, etc.
Mark Liberman said,
July 22, 2025 @ 6:59 am
@Jerry Packard: "So I guess it would also apply to mosquitoes, ants, etc."
Even without going beyond birds and squirrels, discarding animal-edible dribs and drabs in a trash receptacle might count as "feeding"…
John Baker said,
July 22, 2025 @ 8:11 am
Legal drafting is hard, and there is no reason to think that the strict technical sense of “animal” should prevail. If it did, then someone feeling mosquito bites would be obligated to leave the sidewalk if the bites could not otherwise be stopped. The OED notes that “animal” is “Frequently applied specifically to a mammal, as opposed to a bird, reptile, fish, etc.,” although I note that this reading implies that feeding reptiles is not prohibited. I suspect that the intended meaning may equate animals with quadrupeds.
Philip Taylor said,
July 22, 2025 @ 8:14 am
John — "I suspect that the intended meaning may equate animals with quadrupeds" — and thus may (for example) offer a jam doughnut to one’s (bipedal) mate without fear of prosecution. Thank the Lord for that !
Scott P. said,
July 22, 2025 @ 8:40 am
If I said I was attacked by wild animals while camping, I daresay most people would not envision a goose assault.
Mark Liberman said,
July 22, 2025 @ 8:42 am
@Philip Taylor: "'I suspect that the intended meaning may equate animals with quadrupeds' — and thus may (for example) offer a jam doughnut to one’s (bipedal) mate without fear of prosecution. "
The number of feet seems to matter less than whether or not the animal in question is wild…
Bruce Rusk said,
July 22, 2025 @ 8:58 am
As I read it, the bylaw makes a meaningful distinction between wild animals on the one hand and birds, wild or otherwise, on the other. This may be because its intent is to allow pet owners to, e.g., give their dog a treat in the park while forbidding the feeding of flocks of pigeons or parakeets, which, the feeder might argue, are possibly escaped pets and thus not wild.
Bob Ladd said,
July 22, 2025 @ 9:34 am
For "in the street" and "on the street", there's also a fairly clear British/American difference, with "in" more common in BritEng and "on" more common in AmEng. Perhaps the SF lawmakers wanted to make sure British tourists understood?
Philip Taylor said,
July 22, 2025 @ 9:40 am
Oh, even if we understood, Bob, most of we Britons would unhesitatingly feed any wild animal that was clearly begging for food, especially if it appeared "cute" (with the possible exception of grizzly bears and similar …).
DaveK said,
July 22, 2025 @ 9:45 am
I handled auto insurance claims for many years and one part of the policy paid for damage to the policyholder’s car if it collided with another car or a fixed object (i.e. a tree) and another part that paid for damage from theft or “collision with bird or animal”. The deductible on the second part was usually lower and there was a lot of in-office debate over which deductible to charge if someone’s car collided with a human being. (It was a gruesome business at times).
The legal conclusion was that striking a person was humans and animals were treated differently under traffic laws so hitting a pedestrian was more like hitting a vehicle than hitting an animal. Thankfully we never had to deal with a collision with a horse and rider.
~flow said,
July 22, 2025 @ 10:24 am
I find it hilarious that should I ever get attacked and devoured by a grizzly bear on or in the streets or sidewalks of San Francisco, my descendants would likely be liable to pay a fee to the City due to the rules of Section 486.
Gregory Kusnick said,
July 22, 2025 @ 10:38 am
I guess I'm willing to concede that birds, though undoubtedly tetrapods, are not quadrupeds.
But I also like Bruce's thinking that there's a spectrum of wildness on which, say, squirrels and raccoons are less domesticated than pigeons.
David L said,
July 22, 2025 @ 10:48 am
I suspect that if you asked random people on the street "are birds animals?" you would be met a variety of uncertain looks and answers.
Y said,
July 22, 2025 @ 2:11 pm
There is no prohibition against feeding seagulls at a public fountain or a square then, is there?
Craig Close said,
July 22, 2025 @ 2:12 pm
The use of 'shall' is a legal point. Requirements to be observed or included are listed with 'shall' in legal contracts. The intial step in working a government contract is to extract all the 'shalls' so that the full list of requirements becomes known to the workers.
David Morris said,
July 22, 2025 @ 3:32 pm
Jerry Packard mentioned mosquitos and Scott P mentioned being attacked by wild geese. The logical combination of those is that being surrounded and bitten by a swarm of mosquitos is 'being attacked by wild animals'.
Does the San Francisco police department enforce this law? What is the penalty?
Julian Hook said,
July 22, 2025 @ 5:20 pm
The choice of the conjunction "&" or "and" in the sign and the heading of the ordinance could also be considered problematic. The ordinance itself makes it clear that feeding either birds or wild animals is prohibited; that is, feeding birds is prohibited, and feeding wild animals is also prohibited. But someone who sees only the sign, where the conjunction is "&," may logically conclude that feeding birds is perfectly fine as long as you don't also feed wild animals, and vice versa.
Scott P. said,
July 22, 2025 @ 7:52 pm
The initial step in working a government contract is to extract all the 'shalls' so that the full list of requirements becomes known to the workers.
So you're saying you have to play a shall game?
Garrett Wollman said,
July 22, 2025 @ 9:08 pm
In the process of publishing an ISO standard, one of the editorial steps the text must go through is called "shallification": all statements that express a mandatory compliance requirement must be (re)worded with "shall", and those that express optional behaviors (permitted but not mandatory) must use "may". Contrast with Internet standards, which use the language of RFC 2119, "MUST", "SHOULD", "MAY", "SHOULD NOT", "MUST NOT" (capitalization for clarity of reference, not emphasis). Sometimes the shallification goes a bit overboard and mistakenly turns statements that are requirements on relying parties, rather than requirements on whoever is practicing the standard, into "shalls", which then have to be fixed up in further editorial rounds or after-publication corrigenda.
Chas Belov said,
July 22, 2025 @ 9:54 pm
I didn't realize birds might not be considered animals. But the ordinance makes it sound to me like you can feed non-red-parakeet birds in parks, as well as wild animals. So if you are eaten by a bear, be sure it happens in a park so as not to run afoul of this ordinance.
For the record, I abhor "here" links and did not state the link that way. I acknowledge that Language Log does not share that abhorrence.
Chas Belov said,
July 22, 2025 @ 9:55 pm
I also acknowledge it was my bad to not make the ordinance URL a link in my email, as I abhor bare URLs as well.
Chas Belov said,
July 22, 2025 @ 11:17 pm
I also hope nobody rushed out to a park to be eaten by a bear – or by a pigeon for that matter. You also need to be sure that it eats you on the grass, since a path might (not "shall") be taken to be a "sidewalk" under this ordinance.
Gregory Kusnick said,
July 22, 2025 @ 11:22 pm
I have no problem with the ampersand. To me it straightforwardly reads as "Feeding birds is prohibited, and feeding wild animals is (also) prohibited." Or equivalently, "Feeding (any member of the set comprised of) birds and wild animals is prohibited."
Regarding "shall", it's all very well to write in a contract that "Party A shall do this and party B shall do that." But to say in an ordinance that "It shall be unlawful" seems different. Either it's unlawful or it isn't, unless perhaps we're still waiting for the mayor to sign it into law.
Andy Horn said,
July 23, 2025 @ 5:12 am
Feeding red-masked parakeets was prohibited in the 90s because neurologic symptoms seen in the birds (e.g., ataxia, seizures) were attributed to inappropriate food. Now the cause is known to be rodenticide (Bromethalin). https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0213248