Kill All The Rats?

A friend concerned about seeing rats in the parks of Boston at night asked if I knew about the poisoning policy. I replied that I know poison is put out with some frequency. My email discussion: "I think they have to strike a balance between having a dangerous amount of poison continuously present in public areas (danger to humans, children and pets) and putting out enough to try to control the rats. It is an extremely difficult problem because construction never stops in Boston and therefore displacement of mice and rats doesn't stop.

"A former commercial exterminator whom I happened to meet last week said he was called to Bay Village when the Big Dig got underway. There he found thousands of quite beautiful and sociable rats of a type no one seemingly had encountered before. Displaced by the massive dig, these creatures seemed to have rarely -- if ever -- encountered humans and went right up to them. He said they had reddish golden brown fur like cats and in general were sociable and sweet-tempered animals. Because of their lack of fear it was easy to kill them, he said. Nevertheless it was a massive effort -- perhaps even an extinction for that kind.

I am sympathetic with people who get upset upon seeing a mouse or a rat -- the typical "eek" scream -- although I am also aware that deeply-entrenched cultural repulsion is based on incorrect data fearfully impressed on them when they were children. It's a generational and favorite fallacy that rats caused the bubonic plague. Not so. The plague resulted from human-fecal-contaminated water in the streams. Perhaps it would bring a bit more equilibrium to society if humans who get very terrorized about the idea or the presence of rats could be re-educated.

Animals do live in the city and in the world with us. Trying to kill all the mice and rats in a city is a bit like trying to kill all the squirrels or pigeons or seagulls -- the desire to do so is perhaps understandable but there are deep, nuanced and little-understood consequences about declaring any area of the planet a "human only" zone.

When I see my friends or others scream in panic upon seeing a mouse or rat, I try to calm them down and then see if they possibly might be receptive to unlearning a cultural bias based on a prevalent misconception, probably so powerful because of fear of death. To see a rat and think "death" is no more fact-based than to see a pigeon and think "death."

Non-human animals are often judged as dirty, brutal, disease-carrying and worse. Could we once in a while give a few seconds of thought to the idea that those words -- with emphasis on disease-carrying -- could apply quite handily to "human" animals?