From: Luke Jacobus
Columbus
Government entities at all levels should not resort to flimsy science — at best — to justify their acts of coercion or lack thereof. This undercuts government authority and public trust in scientific pursuits.
As a college biology educator with experience handling vertebrate wildlife and studying pests and parasites, I felt compelled to write regarding a front page article in Thursday’s Republic: “County pest laws stiffen: Areas that are insect breeding grounds targeted.”
The article describes efforts to stiffen penalties county-wide for people who do not take efforts to rid their properties of a variety of wildlife, including “rodents, certain birds, skunks, raccoons and opossums. Those animals are known to attract disease-carrying insects such as fleas, ticks, lice and mosquitoes.”
I have to speak up about the proliferation of misunderstandings about those wildlife species and the species of arthropods associated with them. This leads to misplaced fear of wild animals, including insects. While, yes, it is true that those vertebrates do attract fleas, ticks, lice and mosquitoes, I don’t know that they are any more of an attractant than other land vertebrates, including humans and especially our pets.
Moreover, many of the insect species found on most wildlife — especially the lice and fleas — are not attracted to humans and cannot survive on us, and therefore pose no threat. Different kinds of fleas, such as those attracted to non-native rodents and pets, and lice specific to humans, pose more problems for us. In my experience, healthy rodents, birds, skunks, raccoons and opossums are very clean and well-groomed. If you spend time watching them in nature, you’ll see that they are fastidious about removing parasites from their bodies and, in fact, feed on ticks and other arthropod pests in our yards. The skunks and opossums in particular reduce arthropod populations in nature, rather than lead to their increase. The breeding areas of most of these arthropod pests, and where they spend most of their life cycles are away from vertebrate hosts.
In reality, it is the humans, dogs, cats and other animals we favor (including deer, which contribute to tick problems), and the environmental conditions we construct— carpet, grass, flower pots and gutters are where most of these pests spend most of their lives in urban environments — that promote arthropod pest problems.
I agree that the vertebrates in the article should be managed in areas of dense human population, and in select rural cases, but for reasons other than insect pests. In addition to the biological reasons, such as direct transmission of germs and parasitic worms, we should be honest about why we are wanting to manage these non-human animals and why we do not like them. It is because they smell funny or look funny. They inconvenience us. They scare us because we do not understand them.
While we do need to manage them under certain circumstances, we should be careful about justifying our prejudices with information that is not accurate or not the full truth.
