ANIMAL JUSTICE ACTIVISTS URGE B.C. ENVIRONMENT MINISTRY NOT TO POISON MICE AND RATS OUT OF HUMAN KINDNESS.
BRITISH COLUMBIA’S UNRESOLVED, CONTENTIOUS RODENT ERADICATION STRATEGIES.
The provincial government of British Columbia Canada’s Environment Ministry currently is being lobbied by animal rights
organizations to protect, EVEN MORE SO THAN BEFORE, in particular, mice and rats among other wild animals in B.C. from
being exposed to ineffectual, Ministry-approved, Rodenticides already being used by exterminators and pest control companies in a losing battle to try to prevent rodents from
reaching plague-like numbers in every urban and rural setting of B.C. Th same thing is happening everywhere in Canada.
Animal rights activists argue rodents are smart, sensitive creatures, capable of displaying altruism towards their own
species, who don’t deserve the pain and horrifying deaths they’re being forced to suffer due to commercial poisoning.
However, they seldom mention how also devious and cunning rodents are in surviving whatever strategies humans ever have
devised to ultimately try to eradicate them.
Yet B.C.’s Environment Ministry is now considering ever further critically-important changes to its Integrated Pest Management Regulations, whose deadline for all public opinion input, unfortunately, already is now since past.
The British Columbia government’s impending momentous decision to perhaps even further restrict or entirely end the use
of what animal activists refer to as the Cruel Poisons, follows on the heels of the Ministry’s already previously severely watered-down approval of relatively-ineffectual second-generation anti-coagulant rodenticides
(SGARs) for usage as poisonous deterrents to try to contain the ever-mounting crisis. Pest control companies and
exterminators already are virtually hamstrung to try to control, let alone kill off, the ever-growing numbers of rats
and mice in British Columbia that continue to reach epidemic numbers; not only in commercial settings along B.C.’s
proliferation of water ways, but especially in every urban residential community.
As rising numbers of residential homes and commercial high-rise demolitions continue to occur at alarming rates wherever
provincial, district and city construction codes continue to relax maximum infill height and depth allowances,
developers and builders also continue to build ever bigger, sprawling, deeper residential dwellings to try to both take
advantage of and cope with the corollary explosive infestations of ever-growing numbers of immigrant humans themselves.
These sweeping decisions by mayors and councils everywhere means that the long-standing burrows of vermin that have
cohabitated for countless decades wherever humans have chosen to reside or conduct their everyday business and
commercial ventures, continue to explode into areas where they haven’t been before, also disturbing, in the process, the
ancient burrows and runs that have long-existed below what human structures existed before. Whatever humankind has ever
done in history, or wherever humans have gone to the furthest reaches of the earth, humans, rats, mice, bed bugs and
other vermin have flourished together as if one single species.
The soon to be proposed even weaker, ineffectual SCARs are pest control strategies placed in what commonly is referred
to in the extermination industry as bait stations that restrict access to only mice and rats so as to prevent access to the poisons by other larger animals, wild or
domestic, such as racoons, skunks, squirrels, cats, dogs and other larger animals; thereby minimizing the unnecessary
use or accidental exposure to these other animals other than the vermin they’re intended to kill.
Yet a major inherent problem already exists within this intended desire to protect B.C.’s wildlife numbers by reason of
the fact that the poisons currently approved by B.C.’s Environment Ministry to use in the field already have been
watered down to the extent that the ever-mounting numbers of vermin that ingest the poison continue to live ever-long
enough life cycles to allow them to continue to procreate their species; thereby further compounding the government and
commercial pest control agencies growing inability to eradicate the threat.
This is coupled by the reality that, since the outset of the Covid Pandemic, it continues to remain a serious impediment
to understaffed and under-trained vermin exterminators and pest control companies to employ adequate numbers of workers
needed to seriously cope with the vermin infestations everywhere. In the end, It’s a matter, as some would say, the old
“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” way of things.
Especially on the eve of yet another momentous decision of the Environment Ministry regarding pest control that is
considering: prohibiting Preventative Baiting, meaning no snap traps, glue traps and bait traps laying around when not needed; requiring the implementation of
so-called Integrated Pest Management strategies, that focus on preventative and alternative control methods, requiring extensive, detailed record-keeping by
workers of their prevention efforts; while Alternative Pest Control Methodology must be documented after the limited use of approved poisons only, during limited actual time periods of time, while
future approved poisons will end of being even further watered down to a ridiculously-ineffectual degree and
administered by already watered-down staffs who may or may not be adequately trained.
Still, Animal Justice advocates continue to scream bloody murder and persist in naively arguing that the highly-altruistic behavior displayed by rats and mice towards their own species now justifies even kinder, more gentle, lesser forms of eradication
This in spite of the fact that rodent vermin are well-known for their incredible reproductive capability. Female mice,
for instance, can, after their birth, reach sexual maturity within 4 to 8 weeks of age and produce 5 to 12 babies in 5
to 6 more litters per year. Rats have an even quicker sexual maturation and can give birth in as little as 25 days after
themselves being born. It’s not uncommon for rats to have as many babies in five to ten litters per year themselves. It
doesn’t take a rocket scientist to compute the numbers over time if this be the preferred strategies of pest control in
the future.
Because such vermin are capable of rapid procreation, coupled by the fact that they’re also cunning, devious,
resourceful, and notoriously hard to get rid of once they’re established, it’s a constant race among humans to continue
to come up with and put into place ever more rational, well-thought strategies of effective eradication that, instead of
compounding the problem of prevention instead only encourages ever -greater, more severe, proliferations of vermin
capable of creating life-threatening pestilence and disease of pandemic proportions to the health and welfare to all
human beings within their midst. But this is, in fact, what B.C.’s Environment Ministry has done over the years in
ever-lowering the strengths of approved poisons that now are facing even more restrictions that favor not the
eradication of vermin but their proliferation.
HEALTH DANGERS OF B.C’S PROPOSED INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT REGULATIONS
throughout urban and rural British Columbia, let alone the other provinces of Canada, rats and mice are known to spread
as many as 35 different diseases and pathogens that include: Rat Bite Fever (RBF); Choriomeningitis Virus (LCMV);
Leptospira; Salmonellosis; Tularemia; Bartonella, and even; common hospital bacteria like C.-difficule and Staphylococcus bacteria. Even just by breathing in the dust particles soiled with rodent droppings or urine can cause within human
community’s deadly diseases that include the: Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome; Hemorrhagic Fever, and; various strains of Lymphocytic choriomeningitis.
To better understand the issue at hand one need only ask any professional exterminator or pest control person if, in
their attempts to rid the rodents from any given urban or rural area, they have ever witnessed: rodents found caught in
snap traps or glue traps, cannibalized by other mice or rats, or; dead or dying rodents in bait stations who have been
eaten alive by other rodents of their own kind who find them struggling to free themselves, and the problems this
creates for any human, professional exterminator or private citizen, who must dispose of their carcasses.
So much for the altruism professed by animal justice spokes people, or those in government ministries who have only
approved ever-weaker and ineffective rodent poisons that won’t kill rodents in a short enough timespan in order to
sufficiently interfere or break entirely whatever new litters of rodents before they reach the ability to procreate
themselves and further magnify the potential plague conditions that are constantly being manifested throughout British
Columbia, Canada and, indeed, the world.
The philosophical and ideological premise of too many animal justice advocates is not only ill-thought out but utterly
imbecilic and irresponsible insofar as truly considering the health and well-being of urban and rural human populations
and communities everywhere in the world. One need only consider the many cyclical plagues of rodents that, annually,
nearly every four years over the past century, have plagued so many countries; such as Australia’s farmlands and outback
rural settlements in places like Gilgandra, New South Wales. Where is the commonsense approach in all this?
Op-Ed: Jerome Irwin, June 17th, 2022
ENDS
AUTHOR’S BIO NOTES
Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American writer-author whose diverse and myriad career spans a number of unusual twists and
turns that include: a one-time gradual defection from the ‘American Dream’ that first began width a: brief affiliation
with the CIA in clandestine communications; followed by a stint in the field of Criminology with American law
enforcement; that in turn involved work as a VISTA Volunteer with troubled American white-brown-black, indigenous youth;
before then becoming a community activist in Canada and the U.S. for Native American, First Nation and Metis indigenous
rights. For decades since, as a Canadian writer-author-community activist Irwin has sought to call world attention to
myriad crises of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by the host of environmental, ecological and
spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting world philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Irwin
also is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a
spiritual odyssey among the native peoples of North America/Turtle Island that has led to numerous related issues
pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC & Israel apartheid against Palestine & related U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement pertaining to the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza; not to mention the many violations constantly waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda
interests against every human community on the Earth and the World’s Collective Soul. For 50 years he has lived with his
Australian therapist wife on the North Shore of British Columbia, 40 of which have been spent preserving as a Canadian
legacy their combined spirit’s dream house known as “The Elf Inn”.