Speaking as someone who mostly tries to live in harmony with wildlife and really doesn't mind, say, the mice in the house, or the raccoons who sometimes make an unspeakable mess in the yard:
I home compost, and that absolutely supports the rat population. I could switch to pickup, I suppose, but the 100% most rat-friendly part of my house that I can't bear to change is the composting.
Also the rat tunnels destroyed a large part of my garden last summer, killing all the strawberries in a raised bed and doing a number on a lot of other berries.
But more importantly, they did thousands of dollars of damage to my garage last winter, because it turns out they can chew through cinder block when sufficiently motivated, and they almost pulled the garage down. So they are quite honestly actually a problem.
Also apparently an abandoned car turned into a massive rat breeding nest a few blocks from here last winter.
(Not to mention that, with apartment building and dunks' dumpsters all around my neighborhood, there are so many rats that all the commercial spaces are going to use poison as long as they're allowed, because traps take daily maintenance which is more than commercial property managers tend to bother with, and then the rats get eaten by the raptors and also die horribly in my basement. Banning poison would solve that problem, obviously, but unless the city is aggressively dry icing on both private and public property, people will just use illegal poison.)
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Date: 2023-03-03 03:34 pm (UTC)Speaking as someone who mostly tries to live in harmony with wildlife and really doesn't mind, say, the mice in the house, or the raccoons who sometimes make an unspeakable mess in the yard:
(Not to mention that, with apartment building and dunks' dumpsters all around my neighborhood, there are so many rats that all the commercial spaces are going to use poison as long as they're allowed, because traps take daily maintenance which is more than commercial property managers tend to bother with, and then the rats get eaten by the raptors and also die horribly in my basement. Banning poison would solve that problem, obviously, but unless the city is aggressively dry icing on both private and public property, people will just use illegal poison.)