A Grand Canyon National Park ranger stands at the ready with bolt cutters.
Grand Canyon National Park has issued a stern warning on “love locks,” the personalized padlocks couples affix to public structures around the world to represent their love.
“Love is strong, but it is not as strong as our bolt cutters,” reads a park statement posted to Facebook last week. The park routinely uses those cutters to remove locks from fences overlooking majestic views of layered red rock.
The park considers love locks littering and a form of graffiti. But now, it also wants the public to understand how the little locks threaten California condors, a rare and endangered species. After attaching their padlocks to a public structure, people typically toss the keys as a gesture of enduring love. In the Grand Canyon, visitors often throw them into the canyon, where the birds, who like shiny metal objects, may ingest them.
“Condors are not meant to digest metal and many times cannot pass these objects,” reads the post, which includes an X-ray image of a condor with coins lodged in its digestive tract. The bird had to undergo surgery, according to the post.
“If a condor ingests too many objects like this, it could die,” the Facebook post says.
A California condor had to undergo surgery after ingesting coins. Park officials don’t want the same … [+]
Commenters on the social media platform expressed wide appreciation for the Grand Canyon National Park’s information.
“It is a gorgeous place, as are all our parks, and it is up to us to respect it,” one Facebook user wrote. “Come on, people!!” Wrote another, “I have always wanted to do a padlock love thing. But you have just changed my mind.”
It’s unclear exactly where the love lock tradition started, but it’s believed to have been popularized by the 2007 Italian film “Ho Voglia di Te,” adapted from Federico Moccia’s best-selling novel of the same name. In it, a starry-eyed couple attaches a lock to a Roman bridge to symbolize their eternal love.
The National Park Service is far from the first organization to speak out publicly against the love lock craze. In 2016, New York’s Department of Transportation announced a fine for attaching locks to the Brooklyn Bridge. The practice created new maintenance costs for the city, the DOT said, and endangered vehicular traffic below.
A year earlier, Parisian authorities had to remove part of a bridge after it collapsed under the accumulated weight of hundreds of thousands of locks. An advocacy group there called No Love Locks has called for the practice to be outlawed.
“We are tired of having the once-beautiful heart of the City of Light and Love turned ugly by tens of thousands of rusting padlocks,” the group says on its website.
Many romantics clearly continue to view the locks as a grand amorous gesture. But No Love Locks, Grand Canyon National Park and other opponents want to remind them there are plenty of other ways to express affection.
“People think putting a lock on fencing at viewpoints is a great way to show love for another person,” the park said. “It’s not.”
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