There are many possible images from this short, but when you have an opportunity to go with Donald being a jerk to small animals, you go with Donald being a jerk to small animals. Actually, Donald’s kind of shooting himself in the foot, here, which is not an uncommon experience for Donald. I’m sure he’s thinking of how much of his crops the beetles would eat, and that’s fair, but after all birds eat bugs. That’s why declaring war against sparrows went so badly for Mao, let’s not forget. He likes having birds in his yard, we see, and by keeping bugs out, he’s keeping birds out.

We are hearing the story in the voice of “Bootle Beetle,” the beetle who appears in Disney cartoons now and again. This time, he’s living in a vacant lot next door to Donald’s lush suburban home. This is one of the shorts where Donald is a gardener, and Bootle’s “boy” (son or grandson, one assumes) is admiring the green and pleasant land. Bootle tells him the story of the time he himself went over to Donald’s yard and tried to live on the fat of the land and how that didn’t so much work for him.

The thing is, we actually see birds trying to eat Bootle. Both Donald’s hens and the bluebirds Donald feeds birdseed to. Donald injures his own hen trying to smash Bootle with a hoe, when you’d think, you know, just letting the hen eat the beetle it has trapped would be the smarter option. This is one of those things where clearly someone planting crops isn’t thinking things through, like the Central Valley farmers in California irrigating their crops in the middle of the day when it’s over 100 degrees out. Sure, you want to keep the bug away from your watermelon, but if he goes into the chicken run of his own volition, let him?

You might also wonder what Donald feels about pollinators, because of course that’s something bugs do on a regular basis. And goodness knows we’ve seen Donald at war with bees. It seems clear that Donald is one of those tiresome types who thinks that only the “good” nature is the kind to have around and will wage undying war on “bad” nature. This isn’t invasive species; frankly, Donald’s the sort it’s not hard to picture planting them because he likes how they look or smell even if he’s been specifically told not to by his local government. This is just not liking things he can’t control.

Obviously, the Disney regulars are separate from the natural world even though they’re generally farmyard animals moved into suburbia. Donald, however, seems almost to have a memory of the times when he could actually fly and splashed merrily in ponds—and he doesn’t like it. He wants to regulate nature and keep it orderly, and the fact that he, too, is not logically removed from eating beetles is not something he wants to contemplate. How dare they exist in his world when he doesn’t want them to?

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