`Utility negligence grills squirrel'.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

Wednesday's paper confirmed what I'd suspected: Furry animals are the world's latest terrorist threat.

At least in the Northwest. From Medford to British Columbia, the reports have been coming in fast and furious lately.

The latest two: A squirrel started a brush fire in B.C., and a gopher chewed through an underground fiber-optic cable between Pendleton and Echo, cutting long-distance service for about 44,000 phone lines in three counties.

I suspect such four-legged terrorists will soon trigger Patriot Act II. (And you thought we only had to worry about libraries.)

Consider what's happened in our region in only the last three months:

A burrowing badger in Hermiston, according to The Associated Press, "was blamed for a 50-foot break in an earthen dam that sent 78 million gallons of industrial lagoon water across a rural road into a tributary of the Umatilla River." (These terrorists are anti-environment.)

"Ravenous sea lions won't be stopped" read a headline in April. They're frequenting the all-you-can eat salmon bar at Bonneville Dam. (They are anti-fishing, intent only on fattening their own gastronomical creels.)

In Medford, 28 people in May alone reported black bears around their homes. (They are anti-suburbia.)

In Bend, a cougar killed a dog and other animals. (They are anti-pet.)

It is one thing to be anti-environment, but when you start messing with suburbia and pets, the government starts worrying about an erosion of true American values. And they seek to smite these enemies of the people.

Already, dam workers at Bonne- ville have resorted to fireworks to try and dissuade the salmon-stuffing sea lions. It won't stop there. When I lived in the Seattle area, authorities at the Ballard Locks tried - unsuccessfully - firecrackers, rubber bullets and underwater broadcasts of killer whale sounds. (I'm not sure what the scariest whale sound might be, but I have an idea.)

My reaction to all this? I know to admit this is to invite wiretaps on my phones and telephoto lens surveillance as I'm feeding my squirrels - "he's obviously sending little messages to the twerps inside the peanut shells" - but here it is:

What goes around comes around.

Let's say someone just laid a few hundred miles of fiber-optic cable through your home without your authorization; you'd probably be mad enough to chew through it, too. (I wonder if that gopher, to stave off the boredom of incessant chewing, might have had its iPod playing that famous end-of-game song: `Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw, gnaw ... gnaw, gnaw, gnaw, gnaw ... hey, hey ... goodbye.')

And, well, if you build your earthen dam next to burrowing badgers, you've got nobody to blame for your dam failure but yourself. Burrowing badgers do that: they burrow. God made burrowing badgers, but not fiber-optic.

As for the inflamed squirrel, British Columbia authorities should be glad the rodent wasn't human or they'd be facing a whopper lawsuit.

The squirrel's ancestors were there long before someone stuck up a utility pole. The squirrel zipped up that pole - there being no "Attention Rodents" warnings - then got zapped. It burst into flames, fell to the ground and started the fire.

But, of course, the headline wasn't "Utility negligence grills squirrel." It was "Squirrel blamed for another fire." As in: "There they go again, voluntarily bursting into flames to start brush fires. How dare they."

Remember, folks: They were here first. Liabilities? No. Victims? Yes.

Some folks, like those who move to woodsy outskirts of town and complain about deer eating their gardens, see animals as The Enemy.

Me? Hey, if you don't want foul balls on your roof, don't move next to a high school baseball field.

After all, as this urban-rural war on terror escalates, exactly who's intruding on whom?