I read once (a long time ago) that in the event of a nuclear event, three creatures will still be standing: the coyote, the rat, and the cockroach.
Rats. We all hate them. Well, not Willard. Or the owners of cute pet rats purchased from a pet store. Or Michael Jackson, who sang that hit song, “Ben”, back in 1972. If you are unfamiliar with either the song or the names, you need go no further back in time than to 1971 when the movie, “Willard” was released. It’s a cult classic. The rats are not cute, and Ben is certainly not a loveable pet as the song implies. Ben did not come from a pet store. I have never quite understood what pet rat owners see in the buggers, but…”to each his own”.
There are a lot of species of rats in the world, the most notorious of which is the very large Norway rat. The common brown rat. The rat that has long been blamed for the spread of the Black (Bubonic) Plague. The rats that stow away on merchant ships, chew into the stores, poop and pee on all the foods, and then jump ship in the harbor. The first creatures to leave a sinking ship according to the old idiom.
Rats.
I am not a fan of rats. I’ve had them die inside the walls of my home and bloat, host bot flies, and stink to high heaven until their bodies finally deflate and the maggots have nothing else to feed on. I have listened to them rustle inside the walls and I have heard them set off the instant kill traps that rarely work as advertised (the rats flop around awhile before they finally die. It’s disturbing). I have observed them hiding In gutters in NE Portland, sneak across drive-in parking lots, and dash through the aisles in major grocery stores. I have watched them climb trees to get to bird seed.
But here’s the thing: I’m not fond of rattlesnakes, either. Or scorpions. Earwigs. Little deer mice that carry Hanta Virus. Spiders crawling on my face. We all get the “heebie jeebies” over something. That doesn’t mean we’re always right or the thing bothering us is really something to be unreasonably frightened of. They exist, and so do we.
This past week I have discovered a dead squirrel in my yard. A neighbor discovered one in its dying throes. Tonight, someone else posted that the found two dying or dead squirrels. Everyone loves squirrels, right?
They’re cute, they eat peanuts, they pose, they tease our dogs and cats. They’re photogenic. They also carry fleas, raid bird nests, poop on everything, and – in the case of at least two of those squirrel deaths – are not native. The ones in my immediate neighborhood were Eastern grey squirrels that have been pushing out the Eastern Fox squirrels which, in turn, pushed out our native Douglas squirrels. Still, they are adorable, cute, beloved, and generally loved whereas rats are the opposite. And the poison which killed the squirrels in all of the above cases was poison meant to kill rats.
The problem with poison is this: it is non-species-specific. It doesn’t discriminate, it doesn’t break down, and it induces an agonizing death in the creature unfortunate to have eaten it.
And once that creature has died (usually not in the same yard where the poison was administered, but in a neighbor’s yard), the poison remains as potent as before it was administered.
In two of the cases listed above, the property owner discovered the dead/dying squirrels BEFORE the beloved cat or dog did.
Read that last line again. Say it out loud for those in the back of the room. The poison someone sets out to kill the rats they think are living in their yard is the poison that kills the neighbor’s dog or cat. It is the poison that kills the vulture, the mouse, the coyote, the raccoon, or the skunk that feeds on the carrion. Then it kills whatever dines on those carcasses. Birds, rodents, bears, pets.
Sticky traps are not a whole lot better, often trapping songbirds and sentencing them to an agonizing death.
I could go on, but I won’t. You get the picture.
“But…But…My neighbor feeds the birds and the bird seed attracts the rats and…”
In my neighborhood, we are often blamed for the rats that wander through “Just looking for a home”. We feed the birds. We also have a vegetable garden, fruit trees, a grapevine, berry bushes, and a compost heap. Two doors down (to the north and to the south), we have neighbors that raise chickens for the eggs. A quarter mile away as the crow flies, there is a major waterway that flows into a major port. We are surrounded by little wild parks where deer, coyotes, skunks, raccoons, and the occasional mountain lion dwell.
We have rats. Rats live where there is water, shipping lanes, grocery stores, backyard gardens, fruit trees, chicken coops. They live where skunks and raccoons live. Rats feed coyotes and foxes.
I’m not a fan of rats. Willard (the movie) cemented a deep-seated human loathing of the creature. We have mitigated entries into buildings on our property to repel rats (except the garage. There’s always still one building where the buggers might consider building a nest). What we have NOT done is take down our bird feeders, eliminated our wildlife watering spots, planted lawn where the vegetables grow, or lopped down the fruit trees. We have accepted that rats live among us, like it or not.
I read once (a long time ago) that in the event of a nuclear event, three creatures will still be standing: the coyote, the rat, and the cockroach.
Our neighbors still have a long way to go to understand they live in a world where the creature is the undisputed king of survival.
