The Advisory has completed its review of the bread question and finds the matter unsettled.

The review was requested after a bird was photographed on the pavement along the river with its wing turned outward at the carpal joint, a condition the Advisory notes is well described in the literature and poorly explained by it. The deformity is not in dispute. The Advisory has seen the photograph. The wing is turned outward.

What is in dispute is everything else.

The Advisory reviewed the available work on diet and skeletal development in waterfowl and found it thinner than the public campaigns on this subject imply. Sample sizes are small. Controls are difficult, because a bird on a river is not a bird in a pen and does not eat only what you hand it. The mechanism most often described is plausible and has not been isolated. Several of the studies most frequently cited turn out, on reading, to cite each other.

The Advisory wishes to be clear that it is not asserting the opposite. It is asserting nothing. That is the finding.

A proposal was put to the Advisory to post a sign along the water asking the public not to feed bread to waterfowl. The Advisory considered the proposal at length and could not satisfy itself that the sign would be supported by the evidence, on the grounds that the evidence does not currently support anything.

The proposal was held for further study.

The Advisory records that it is aware of the position advanced by the minority: that the question is not whether bread causes the deformity but who pays if the answer is yes. Under that view, a person who stops feeding bread has lost an afternoon, and a bird whose wing has turned has lost the wing, permanently, and there is no version of the year in which it gets the wing back. The minority holds that when the two costs are that unequal you act on the weaker evidence, because the arithmetic is not close.

The Advisory finds this argument emotionally forceful and methodologically insufficient.

The Advisory further notes that a sign, once posted, is difficult to unpost, and that a body which acts on inconclusive evidence in one direction may find itself asked to do so in another.

The review is concluded. The Advisory thanks its members for their time. The matter remains open and may be reconsidered when better evidence is available, which the Advisory expects will require a properly controlled study, for which no funding has been identified and no applicant has come forward.

DISSENT, PRINTED IN FULL

The bird itself was invited to submit and did so.

I do not have the studies. I want to say that first so nobody has to say it for me.

I have the wing. It goes out and not back. It has been going out and not back since the spring and it will go out and not back for the rest of it, and I want you to understand that this is not a position I am arguing, it is a shape I am.

You are all correct. Nobody has proven it. I have read your finding, or had it read to me, and there is nothing in it that is wrong.

I would only observe that the study you are waiting for will be finished after I am, and that when it arrives it will be about me, and I will not be one of the readers.

— filed from the pavement, South Water Street

The Advisory has printed the above without comment, as is its practice, and has overruled it, as is also its practice.

Injured or deformed waterfowl in Rhode Island: the Wildlife Clinic of Rhode Island, 401-294-6363. This number is real. Everything above it is not.