All of the above and more. For one thing, pigeons hated those beams of light; when they were trying to fly home after dark, when a party had been longer and wilder than planned, the beams would blind them and they would end up crashing into the duckpond in the park. The beams annoyed the hell out of bats because their prey, the small nocturnal insects, would all steer toward the beams and it would become harder and harder to find a square meal in reasonable reach of the home cave. The beams would mess up the circadian cycles of neighboring bears in winter and confuse the beavers in their lodges. so a groundswell of telepathic, organic, deep-seated resentment began to build up and grow and grow. It got so thick that even humans, whose memetic density if legendary, could not think of renting one of those spotlights without getting queasy and turning all absentminded under the subtle barrage of animal thought-beams protesting the idea.

Eventually, the market declined so far that no-one would run the business risk of buying one to rent out, and the rest rotted away through simple attrition.


A