Yes, you read that right.

If you’ve spent anytime this summer enjoying your lunch outdoors, you’ll hardly have escaped the limitless number of seagulls pestering you. They are everywhere, and they are particularly aggressive when they want a bite of your sambo. But right out of your hands isn’t the only place a seagull with snaffle food from; they’re known for ripping into bin bags and divulging in whatever they can find in there.

To combat this, Dublin City Council have been looking into the use of seagull proof bin bags.

Newstalk reports that:

“Under the scheme, businesses and residents will drop their rubbish bags into protective anti-seagull sacks before putting their waste out for collection. Workers will then empty the rubbish bag into their trucks and return the re-useable anti-seagull bag to the customer.”

Niall Hatch of Birdwatch Ireland spoke with Pat Kenny earlier today, saying he hoped this new scheme would work. He said that Birdwatch Ireland had long been calling for a better way to handle bins when it came to seagulls, telling Kenny that:

“It stands to reason that if you put out flimsy plastic bin bags on the street, birds like gulls are going to break into them.”

With the sturdier bin bags, seagulls will likely become less bothersome to humans when it comes to scavenging nearby. Hatch said that:

“We certainly hope that this will help to alleviate the problem, and then will hopefully then reduce the conflicts between humans and gulls.”

While seagulls are generally seen as pests to humans, Hatch went on to say that they actually perform quite a “valuable service” when it comes to cleaning up roadkill and rats.

Header image via Shutterstock

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