4 ms·
It seems to me that "continually kill large numbers of X" is an inherently broken solution to "I don't want X to live here". If you have large numbers of X, it
by Zak 9y ago
It seems to me that "continually kill large numbers of X" is an inherently broken solution to "I don't want X to live here".
If you have large numbers of X, it's because you're creating a very favorable habitat for it. If you don't address that issue and just keep killing them, you'll have both large numbers of X and large numbers of X corpses.
There are also arguably ethical issues with killing huge numbers of intelligent, social animals simply because we don't like their presence.
- maoistinquisitr 9y agoA traditional and effective measure against urban rat populations is stray cats. But for whatever reason people in the west won't allow that anymore.
- Zak 9y agoOne of the related stories on the site talks about using feral cats: https://wamu.org/story/17/07/07/feral-cats-solve-d-c-s-rat-problem/ https://wamu.org/story/17/07/07/feral-cats-solve-d-c-s-rat-p... There is a program to place feral cats with residents who request them and it has a waiting list. Its effectiveness is debated, and bird advocates don't like it.
- rootbear 9y agoI've seen rats in DC that would eat a cat for breakfast. Those suckers are huge!
- molloy 9y agoCats can decimate local bird populations as well
- lovich 9y agoBecause they are indiscriminate. They are not programmed to attack just rats, they will decimate all small animal populations and fight with pets. We could let that happen but that comes back around to having an increasingly human unfriendly environment to deal with the rats
- taneq 9y agoThe problem is that there are quite a few X who adapt rapidly to new environments and also like the same kinds of environments as humans, and so creating human-friendly X-unfriendly environments becomes increasingly challenging as X adapts more and more to only require what humans require from an environment.