Human(e)

    A quick warning: the following text contains some descriptions of poisons, their resulting effects, and experiments done on both humans and animals; should you feel that you might find reading about such subjects offensive, it might prove advantageous for you to skip this post.

    The rats were back, and this time they appeared as a far cry from when I wrote about them almost gingerly in an earlier post.  This time one might almost classify their appearance as a swarm, a scene from one of those horror-movie films where rats arrived one after the other and in such numbers that you tended to gasp.  Okay, not quite that bad but shocking enough that my wife and I decided that our playful admiration side of them was proving a bit naïve.  The BBC mentioned some time ago that a breeding pair can soon become 200 rats in one year (yes, they breed year round), and we viewed at least 8-10 rats on our porch, scampering around like large flies, far too quick and too smart to fall for those mouse-like snapping trap (rats do learn quickly; we set out a humane catch n' release trap and watched as the rats ran up to it, stepped off to side to pass it, and continued merrily on their way).  So a quick calculation of our visible 10 rats breeding away at a leisurely pace resulted in what might possibly be 2000 rats within a year....yikes!  Something had to be done (rat trails in the grass, along with an increasing number of rat "holes" in parts of our yard and garden, showed that their numbers were likely increasing).  And did I mention that my wife does feed an outdoor feral cat, a rather lazy one apparently who'd much rather eat a better meal placed outside than expend his energy trying to catch a rat or two (or a dozen); the problem was not that we were discovering that what food he left was in turn feeding the rats, but that the rats paid him little attention.  First rule from pest control companies...take away the food.  For my wife, who has been taking care of this feral cat for three years (she's moved on to name him Toby), that wasn't going to happen, partially because she also feeds a family of raccoons that appear each night (the rats are afraid of them).  Stop feeding both the cat and the raccons, she said, and they'll move into the garage with the rats following right behind, which was likely true.  So what to do?

     If your neighborhood is at all similar to ours, pest control companies seem to be proliferating like, well, rats.  We'll kill anything and everything, they say, such as those pesky spiders and termites, flies and any other assorted bugs.  Not interested, I tell them, since we have too many birds and other critters hanging around and that we couldn't risk the possibility of downstream poisoning, despite their "all natural" bug-killing claims.  So back to the rats...rat poison used to be warfarin (once prescribed as Coumadin), a blood thinner that basically caused the rats to die of a stroke, their blood thinned and no longer able to clot or coagulate.  But rat poison has now switched to bromethalin, a nerve agent which proves much more effective since rats appear to have grown a bit resistant to warfarin.  But read a bit more on bromethalin on the Merck site and this is what you'll discover: ...in dogs, an average lethal dose of technical grade bromethalin is reported to be 4.7 mg/kg but 2.38 mg/kg in bait.  Young dogs (<1 yr old) appear more sensitive; death has been reported at dosages of ~1 mg/kg in bait.  Dogs are more commonly involved.  Cats are 2–3 times more sensitive than dogs.  Bromethalin can cause either an acute or a subacute/chronic syndrome, depending on the dose ingested.  At doses equivalent to or more than the average lethal dose, dogs may develop an acute convulsant (or high-dose) syndrome resulting in clinical signs within 4–36 hr of exposure; such signs include hyperexcitability, muscle tremors, grand mal seizures, hindlimb hyperreflexia, CNS depression, hyperthermia, and death.  The paralytic (subacute or chronic) syndrome is seen at lower doses, and clinical signs may not appear for several days (up to 7 days) after exposure.  Initial signs may include depression, hindlimb weakness or paresis, decreased propioception, ataxia, and possible tremors.  Muscle weakness often progresses from posterior to anterior muscles.  Cats typically develop paralytic syndrome irrespective of dose of bromethalin.  Dogs and puppies?  Cats and kittens?  

     Animal testing has been around for centuries, not only for medicines and surgical procedures but also in such innocuous lines as cosmetics* when rabbits (which cannot blink) were administered enough of a chemical or substance until they either were blinded or died from the toxic effects (this was the Draize test, which along with the LD50 test has been ended in many but not all countries; in the latter Lethal Dose 50 test, animals were given enough of a controlled substance until 50% of them died).  In reading Sandeep Jauhar's book on the heart, examples abounded of the number of healthy animals which were used for experiments for heart transplants or valve replacements; most of the animals perished on the operating table or within days (for an animal to remain alive for 30 days was considered a success).  His point was that without such live experimentation such common but once-revolutionary devices such as the heart pacemaker or even stents would not have been perfected; millions of human lives have been saved as a result.  But gaze at the shelves of your grocery store and view the hundreds of detergents and cleaners, along with all the products filled with artificial colorants or sweeteners, and then the realization hits home that the number of animals which were or are being sacrificed or scarred is probably beyond our imagination (most such animals are euthanized shortly after the experiments to see what effects occurred internally, be it to their brains or to their internal organs).  One group questioning such usage is the Canadian organization Animals in Science Policy Institute whose site explains a bit more about those animals used not only in testing and research but also in education; such animals can range far beyond the rats and mice or dogs and cats so commonly thought to be used in research studies (yes, those animals are indeed still being used for carrying out tests) but also to cows, pigs, and chickens, even reptiles.  All of this eventually has to make one question, so what is the difference?  If a person is comfortably sitting down to a meal of chicken (the average person in the U.S. eats 50 chickens annually) or steak (again, the yearly average per person consumption in the U.S. is equal to half a cow), then what does it matter if a few hundred or a few thousand other animals are pulled aside and used for experiments, especially if the results will potentially result in the betterment of humankind?  Take that one step further and one might wonder if such thoughts also entered the mind of Josef Mengele when he experimented on twins.

     The human species is a fractured one, capable of so much good and so much bad, all bound together by judgement, whether that judgement is imposed by oneself or one's peers or society as a whole.  We can label it as one's conscience or one's justification, morality or values; but a simple glance at what most would view as atrocities will show that the definition of being human can often be quite different when we talk of being humane as well.  Anniversaries are often meant to be happy occasions, that of relationships or memorable events which mark the passage of time, and this year of 2019 is no exception.  50 years ago saw the arrival of  Woodstock and the first man to land on the moon, as well as the winding down of the Vietnam War**; 100 years ago came the studies of Arthur Eddington which proved part of Einstein's theory about relativity that space and gravity could bend light (the story in Discover of how all of that came to be is well worth reading).  And some 400 years ago came the introduction of slavery to the U.S.  The 1619 Project first appeared in the NY Times and its related podcast (and I should note that the project made every effort to avoid using the term "slaves" or "slavery" feeling that such words empowered an already dark portion of our history, a period when 20% of the population were not eligible for any rights.  Of course, slavery still exists and it exists in many forms, from sexual imprisonment to indentured labor (some of this I covered in an earlier post).  And something which might be viewed as repugnant or unfeeling to one, might mean very little to another.  As one example, a recent interview on BBC's Hard Talk had the CEO of Phillip Morris defending his company's position of increasing the marketing of their cigarettes and other tobacco products while it searches for a more healthy and ethical alternative.  Beyoncé has a song that says "When you lie to me you lie to yourself; when you hurt me you hurt yourself."  This would seem true for most people...but not all (10 of our first 12 presidents "owned" slaves).

    For my wife and I, reading the many labels of rat poisons and nerve agents used in garden pesticides made us think of what happens downline.  Poison the rat and whether it naturally decays underground or succumbs above ground to be picked up by a magpie or hawk, it will lead to yet another death as the poisons know few boundaries.  Often just reading the cautionary advisories and "what to do if swallowed or breathed" is enough to make one wonder, just what is in this stuff?  Children or dogs can be warned and deterred, but most labels also go on to also advise you not to water too deeply when using the poisons as the chemicals could possibly contaminate the water table (does the same thing happen if the poisoned rats are decaying in their tunnels?).  We decided to look for alternatives.  Baking soda (toxic to rats), corn gluten (dehydrating to rats), even ammonia and red pepper flakes (but not mothballs, a common myth; we found this out for ourselves on our first attempt at using them some decades ago, the balls appearing on our lawn the next morning having been pushed out of the hole)...our baking soda/peanut butter and baking soda/canned cat food mixtures dutifully went out nightly for a week and the results were mixed.  The rats initially appeared to be less prolific but before long we had to admit that we were kidding ourselves as we began seeing babies and younger rats appearing along with the others.  Take the recent stories in Hakai magazine and the desperate efforts of remote Alaskan islands to protect the nesting sites of native birds: Alaska is one of the few places on Earth where rats are still rare.  Only a handful of mainland communities have established populations; Anchorage, the state’s largest city, isn’t considered one of them.  Only about a dozen of the larger islands among the 2,500 within the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which stretches from the Aleutians to the Pribilofs to the shores of the Chukchi Sea, are known to have rat infestations.  That may partly explain why some 40 million seabirds—80 percent of the state’s total—still flock to the refuge to breed...Norway rats, perhaps the most destructive species, can easily swim 200 meters.  In warmer waters, the distance stretches to two kilometers and they can survive adrift for up to three days. The story elsewhere is similar.  Pacific Islanders brought Pacific rats to new haunts by canoe as a food source thousands of years ago.  Ships on missions of war, colonization, and trade later spread Norway and black rats.  Today, rats inhabit more than 80 percent of the world’s islands.  They are famously prolific.  With the ability to produce several litters per year of babies that sexually mature quickly, a mated pair quickly multiplies to thousands.  Where food is abundant, they’ll dine on the richest parts of what’s available, killing more than they can eat, devouring seeds, plants, fruits, reptiles, bugs, eggs, chicks, adult birds.  On Kiska Island, in the Aleutians, researchers have stumbled on rat dens beneath the rocks packed with auklets, including one charnel house of 148 dead birds.

Graphic from Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas espaciais

     My wife and I both strongly believe that each one of us is on a journey and that journey is individual and not for others to judge.  To see the shelves lined with so many toxic chemicals designed to kill and eradicate everything from ants to spiders, wasps to dandelions, it is difficult to find the good in all of this.  The "lungs of our planet" are burning, said USA Today, as the Amazon rainforest continues to burn at an increasing rate (encouraged by its recently elected president; unfortunately the fires in both Angola and Congo are larger according to satellite data).  Glaciers continue to melt.  New parasites, mites and microscopic invaders keep appearing.  And more animals get experimented upon.  But all is not lost.  Regarding the Amazon fires, there may yet be hope said The Conversation.  Will we resort to poison if the rats continue their population climb?  That is something that we'll have to decide at a future date but for now we've moved on to a gas, basically gunpowder without the carbon (yes they make such a thing); my wife sometimes asks me if trying to kill them "humanely" with our non-toxic mixtures is really any different than what the end result of using the poisons would be because both methods result in, well, killing them.  The same question might be asked of Mengele who made decisions of who should be gassed and who also bled children to see how much blood a child could lose before dying.  Horrific obviously, to most at least, but apparently not to Mengele.  But what if much of that happened to you, if you were one of those child twins, would you see things differently?  This did happen of course, and in a story which appeared in The Week, surviving twin Eva Kor began contacting other survivors of Josef Mengele and preaching forgiveness: “Nothing good ever comes from anger,” she said...In 2015, she testified against 93-year-old Oskar Gröning—Auschwitz’s “bookkeeper of death”—at his trial in Germany.  Then she publicly embraced the former SS officer, infuriating some survivors.  “I do it not because they deserve it,” she said of offering forgiveness, “but because I deserve it.”  The example of Mengele and rats is nowhere near the same...or is it?  Where was Mengele's justification?  And where was ours?  Come some time in the future, my wife and I, despite our good intentions, may be asking ourselves if the rats would come to forgive us.     


*On a side note, the history of Russian-born cosmetic king, Max Factor, is quite interesting; he went on to create "make up" (his own invented word) as well as also lip gloss and other lines of "glamour."

**I'm admittedly biased since there are so many excellent documentaries and movies about the Vietnam War, but our local PBS station in my state did an excellent job of capturing and combining archival footage with commentary from surviving veterans; what emerged was a sobering tale of both stories and images, indelibly etched in their memories and now those of the viewers.