At first it was the bold, haunting image that caught me. I merely glanced at the advertisement: the somewhat magnified photo of a raptor’s large amber orb of eyes and the dark, lifeless varmint in its beak declaring, “You call them rodents. We call them dinner.”
In that moment I took the ad to suggest we should not kill rats and other pests in order for the owl community in Malibu to survive. This intuitively suggests an imbalance of nature might take place as we annihilate the 27-mile stretch of rodents, thus potentially starving out the owl population. I love owls, I appreciate them, I like the way they hunt, and I want them to be active rat catchers. I also believe in owl houses to make their job as hunters more efficient. I honor their magical qualities as well as their mystic presence much in the way the Indians do.
But who likes rats? I know someone who has a pet rat. My friend said her pet is much like a dog, responds to its’ name and likes to have its tummy rubbed. But the pet rat gets sick a lot and my friend gives it medicine.
When I think of rats I imagine a scourge of these little beasts known to spread diseases such as salmonellosis, fowl cholera, and bubonic plague scampering up our craggy cliffs, across our orchards, up into our eaves, and scratching between our walls. BTW: plagues still exist and have been accounted for in Asia, New Zealand and Australia where one afternoon a farmer had to kill 70,000 rats. I read in a recent New York Times article that ten owl families living in a barn in Florida “cleared the surrounding sugarcane field of 25,000 rats a year.” Hello! Rats can thrive.
Obviously rodent control is not just a local issue.
According to an animal behavior research group out of England, “…it has been estimated that between a fifth and a third of the world’s food supply never reaches the table because of losses to rodents.” You like cute little house mice? Good, because there are plenty of them. It is said they are the largest mammal population on earth. And they will gnaw away at your foodstuffs faster than you can say, “pass me a Dorito.”
Amidst these cheeky ruminations I return to the advertisement and on closer inspection realize the thrust of this paid-for message is an appeal to humanely treat rodents by encouraging the reader to refrain from using poison products to kill them. The owl in the ad states, “I prefer my meals poison free. Please stop using poison products.”
Fair enough, and very clear, and even perhaps charming. I apologize if I have appeared coarse, but because their numbers suggest rodents know how to exponentially multiply, I prefer extermination thru innovative and creative control methods. I have weighed the “risks” versus the “benefits” and I think dogs, snap traps and raptors are the best way to go. But, if that doesn’t work (better to hire a professional here), you might want to consider a bait (compressed grain wafers) and a bait box. The wafer should contain 1/2 oz to 1 ounce of “rodenticide” called “contac.” It only takes that much to kill an average-size rat. According to the professionals who make a study of “rodent control” it takes up to 15 percent of an animal’s body weight to get a lethal dose.
Oh yeah, did I mention “sticky boards,” which do away with roughly 20 million rodents per year in England? Look it up.
Back to the ad, which asks us to play nice, and to consider animal welfare and the unintentional death to creatures that coexist as part of the Malibu food chain. Unfortunately, using poison as a pest control method proves to be a risk to “non target” creatures, which in this case is the owl.
Having lived most of my life in the city until I moved to Malibu, I never had the thrill, or the experience to listen to and track the screech owl’s sharp cry, nor the barn owl’s murmuring “who who.” Like so many Malibu residents I too have imagined the owl’s mystical presence. The owl enchants.
However, I am still left with the notion that I am punishing the raptor by sweeping away the kill that is the component of its food supply. This pains me, but in truth, I have little concern the local raptor population does not have enough to eat. I trust that varmints of multiple varieties thrive in our local ravines, brush, canyons and holes.
There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t see hawks flying over PCH, the hiking trails, or the fields. As the hawk lives, so does the falcon, the osprey, the owl. If these raptors experience a dearth of carrion here, why wouldn’t they migrate somewhere that would provide a veritable cornucopia for their brood? You might say I believe in this basic tenant of migratory pattern and evolution. For now they are happy in Malibu.