A homeowner in Culver City, California, had been feeding bread to a population of rats, which had then taken up residence in her kitchen and living room and then on her ceilings, where they began to bother the tenants above.
“Unbelievable,” said Dave Schuelke, an exterminator who is one half of Twin Home Experts pest control and home repair company. “I’ve never seen this before.”
Schuelke was talking breathlessly into a camera he was pointing at himself. He was alone behind the house, but his target audience was the nearly 250,000 subscribers to Twin Home Experts, the YouTube channel where he and his twin brother, Jim, post videos of themselves at work. They have achieved more than 70 million views. “Rats in the attic! We take them out with smoke” is a recent title.
Eric Adams, the Mayor of New York City, has been outspoken in his fear and hatred of rats and his campaign to kill them since he took office in 2022. In November, his office posted a job opening for a rat czar. the rats; whoever accepted the position had to be “a bit bloodthirsty.”
“We’re making it clear that rats don’t rule this City,” Mayor Adams said last year.
Reasons to control the urban rat population abound: the animals can transmit disease to humans, destroy property and damage native ecosystems. But rats are also cognitively advanced social animals, and questions about how to control them effectively can raise ethical questions.
Glue traps starve rats for days before dying. The poison leads to a slow and painful death and may endanger other wildlife. Standard wooden traps often trap limbs or tails, forcing rats to desperately gnaw on them to dislodge them. Live-catch traps are difficult to implement, and when many rats are trapped together in the same place without food, they will sometimes eat each other.
Even if the rats were taken from an urban environment, what do you do with them? Release them into forests, where they can harm existing ecosystems? Have them as pets? “You immediately end up in a very uncomfortable position,” said Robert Corrigan, a New York rodentologist who has studied urban rats for decades. “No exit”.
compassionate approach
Rats cause an estimated $20 billion in damage a year in the United States alone by gnawing through electrical wires and burrowing in the walls of buildings; they also feast on the crops.
“In a way, they’re the enemy,” said Michael Parsons, an urban ecologist at Fordham University in New York who has spent 20 years studying city rats. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t touch each other’s hearts.”
Rat catchers and the rat trap industry are not indifferent to this argument. Miguel Nistal, president and CEO of Woodstream, the largest maker of rat traps in the United States, acknowledged that glue traps are “inhumane” and said his company has been phasing them out. But, he added, for particularly dangerous infestations (for example, hundreds of rats under a hospital), glue traps are the fastest and most effective method of control.
Shawn Woods, who reviews mouse and rat traps on YouTube, often considers whether his popularity — he has 1.7 million subscribers — might have less to do with the practical information he imparts and more to do with the spectacle of dead rats. In videos of him, he erases moments of rat death and often demonstrates stuffed animal traps, but imitation channels showing dying rats have popped up.
Woods has a collection of thousands of rodent traps at his home in Oregon. Some of his videos feature old traps, like a 19th-century wooden trap that’s shaped like a rat and shoots harpoons out of its eyes. He refuses to introduce glue traps and snap traps that are not strong enough to immediately kill rats, which he believes cause unnecessary suffering. He discovered that even drowning traps are morally ambiguous: some rats can swim for more than a day before dying. His favorite setup is the Victor Spring Trap, made by Woodstream, modified so that the rats have to go in head first.
‘The people are the enemy’
Erin Ryan, of the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Vancouver, has spent years thinking of ways to implement a city-wide control program that minimizes harm. “What I learned in my research is that compassion means something different to everyone,” she said. “But there is always a time and a place for lethal control when it comes to rodents.” Catching and releasing hundreds of rats is not without its dangers.
Ryan advocates for a more holistic approach, starting with understanding animals and their interactions with the urban ecosystem. Humans brought brown rats to North America, destroyed the habitat of potential predators, and created environments where the rats could thrive. Humans maintain garbage and waste systems and often do not clean their houses.
“To me, rats are not the enemy,” Parsons said. “The people are the enemy.”
Corrigan is often hired for large infestations and devises programs to help control rodents. He can end up with hundreds of rats living in the walls of a bedroom or in a basement. When that happens, he said, it’s an “all-out war to eliminate a very real and substantial risk to human health and safety.” But in the end he has to kill animals that he has spent his entire career studying.
“Can we, as humanity, be compassionate to this animal?” he said. “The answer is a very cold and hard ‘no’.”
‘Are disgusting’
In Culver City, the Schuelke twins caught four rats.
The Schuelkes often receive comments on their YouTube videos berating them for profiting from killing rats. “Which, in a way, makes sense,” Dave said. “But on the other hand, there are too many rats and they need to be killed.” He pointed out that he could try to save all the rats. But how could you run a business doing that? And what other kinds of environmental damage would that cause? “I’m not a fan of saving rats,” he said. “I don’t touch my heart for them. Because they’re nasty.”
Dave took a wooden beam and smashed the head of one of the rats. “I don’t want her to suffer,” he said, as he pushed down with all his weight. The rat struggled for a moment and then stopped. “Poor thing,” Dave said, giving the beam one last push just in case.
By: Oliver Wang
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6599241, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-06 22:00:07
#war #rats #ethical #kill