Of Swans and The Superbowl

I know two things about the superbowl--that more guacamole is consumed that Sunday than any other time of year, an it's famous for its commercials. (All right, I DO know as an uppermidwesterner that this year the Vikings blew it but the Green Bay Packers are in it--go Cheeseheads!) Apparently three of the most popular recent commercials involved animals: the Budweiser Clydesdales, an orca, and farm animals. The Orca one turns on a hangover plot, with three guys and their buddy the orca in an SUV, trying to figure out how to get the whale in the water. Hint: it involves traction and tires. The animtronic farm animals seemed to be involved in some half time ritual, when a shorn lamb runs through as a streaker. I guess you had to be there. I would have thought girls in nearly nothing would have been top commercial contenders, but there still a surprise in animals being human, particularly humans stuck in adolescence. Go naked lamb!
I doubt the super bowl does anything to actually advance the situation of animals, but animals do benefit from some unlikely circumstances. Trumpeter swans have rebounded in Minnesota, and a nuclear power plant has contributed to that turn of events. As a story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports, the discharge of warm water from the plant keeps the Mississippi river channel open. The windfall for birders is populations of swans, eagles, and other waterfall staying through winter. It helps that "the Swan Lady of Monticello" feeds them--about a ton of corn a day for thousands of swans.
 Maybe it's just to help a species that had been hunted to the point of extinction. I do know some wildlife biologists, however, who are suspicious about feeding any wild animals and talk about upsetting the "trophic" order: who eats whom and what where. They prefer a viable ecology in which animals find food the old-fashioned way, on their own. The swan lady's helpful husband admits,
"If I don't come down, they start walking up in the yard," he said. Conditioning animals to expect food can be endearing, sort of like having an orca in the back seat. It can become problematic if the "wrong" animals show up at the trough--animals overpopulating the area, as deer do in many places, or predators like black bears. The debate of which animals to favor, to protect, to help, or to hinder is a complicated, often emotional one.
So the swans will probably get their ton of grain for Super Bowl Sunday. Should there be betting on how many tons of guacamole are consumed?