On March 16, Utah’s Association for Dating Adults ranked the canal at Taylorsville Memorial Park Cemetery the best dating location in Utah.
For years the cemetery’s canal has been a wonderful place for people to feed breadcrumbs to local ducks. Many ducks inhabit this area and swim in the canal during spring and summer.
To celebrate this ranking, hundreds of couples from around the valley visited the canal on March 17 to feed the ducks.
“This is an exciting time,” says Robin Swallow, a Taylorsville local. “We have never had anything like this in Taylorville before. We hope this will bring out more people to visit Taylorsville.”
John and Kayla Raven were one of these couples that came to feed the ducks.
“We came all the way down from Bountiful to enjoy this amazing dating spot. We didn’t even know Taylorsville existed,” says John Raven.
Though many of the people enjoyed their time at the canal, the ducks were not as pleased.
During the celebration one of the couples decided to bring croutons instead of breadcrumbs. Once word got out that bread could have flavor the ducks became outraged by this discovery.
“All these years we have been fed breadcrumbs time and time again. We didn’t know bread could actually have flavor. We have been getting short-changed for years,” says Brant Duck, a local canal resident.
The ducks decided to begin a non-violent protest against people using breadcrumbs instead of croutons. The ducks first began by refusing to eat the bread thrown to them. Local duck feeding residents did not notice any difference in the ducks behavior thinking the ducks were not that hungry.
Fearing that their silent protest wasn’t working, local Taylorsville ducks began organizing their forces to picket outside the student center at Salt Lake Community College’s Taylorsville Redwood Campus.
“It’s about time we bring the humans to justice and inform them of their cruelty in giving us nothing but flavorless bread from the beginning of our settlement in Taylorsville,” says Ruddy Duck, a local crouton activist.
On March 20 at 11:30 a.m. flocks of ducks picketed outside the student center. While crossing Redwood Road, 13 ducks were injured by oncoming cars and two were killed.
“Our losses are great, but out message is greater,” says duck croutons activist leader Mallard Luther King.
The ducks protested outside the student center for two hours. Unfortunately, no one from SLCC was actually present for the protest due to the school’s spring break.
“We probably should have checked the school calendar,” says protest coordinator Ross Duck. The ducks then returned to the canal that afternoon.
Officials are teaming with SLCC’s cafeteria to make a deal with the local ducks to accept the leftover garlic breadsticks at the end of each day.
“We hope this will restore the peace to the Taylorsville’s canal. We would really prefer to not have to clean up after the ducks again. No one should have to do that,” says SLCC spokesperson Donald Downy.
