May
1995
Letter
from the Editor: In the Year of the Rat, the Dog, and the Fish
By Martin Rowe |
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During the Cultural Revolution, Beijing had a “problem” with sparrow
over-population. So Chairman Mao ordered all the citizens to leave their houses
and literally clap the birds out of the sky. Too
frightened by the noise to alight on the trees or buildings, millions
of sparrows had to stay on the wing until they fell exhausted to their
deaths.
Now, so the Associated Press reports (3/29/95), China has a rat problem.
Apparently, an unusually large population of rats is eating up China’s
rice — up to 7.7 million tons of it, or enough to feed 40 million
people for a year. The amount of damage is up 50 percent since 1989,
and instances of disease spread by rats are also on the rise. Nobody
really knows why there are so many rats (in most areas of China there
are two to five times as many rats as normal, and in some parts there
has been a tenfold increase), but the Ministry of Agriculture has blamed
the problem on officials who have not done enough in recent years and
on people who kill snakes, weasels, owls, and other animals that prey
on rats.
Now I don’t think it is good that enough food to feed forty million
people for a year is being eaten by rats, although in the West it is
something we do every year in feeding grain to animals and then eating
them. But I am fearful of the solution the Chinese may come up with,
given the experience with the sparrows and a poor record on human rights.
Once more, what has been really glossed over is the killing of those
animals who served to keep the rat (and sparrow) population under control:
all those animals who have been ground down into aphrodisiacs or potions,
or are generally considered “vermin” who eat “vermin.”
Without a Pied Piper, soon all countries will just have to admit that
there’s no better controller of Nature than Nature herself.
In Hebron, Israel the problem was not rats, but dogs. Apparently, so
the Israeli army says, the dogs were potential or actual rabies carriers.
Others, however, have suggested that the dogs were a potential threat
only to soldiers stalking the villages, since the barking would draw
attention to them and alert any nearby terrorists. So, they shot them — 150 shepherd dogs, domestic animals, and strays. And now Hebron
is a little quieter (except for the bells on the unshepherded goats
which ring throughout the town). Once more, a massacre has occurred
in Hebron; and, once more, the causes and anxieties expressed in the
act of killing have masked a lonely and unspeakable individual suffering.
Certainly, the threat of terrorism hasn’t gone away, and nor
are the chances for peace any better. In this case, however, the ones
who
died offered no complaint, committed no outrage, sired neither terrorist
nor bigot, and have done nothing wrong except in being too close to
human beings for their own good.
Meantime, in the mid-Atlantic a war is going on over fish stocks. The
Spanish have been fishing where they shouldn’t have been —
off the coast of Ireland and Newfoundland. This has caused a rift between
Spain and the northern European Atlantic states who — all being
members of the European Union — are meant to stick together
in the face of the threat of NAFTA. But the vigorous action of the Canadian
authorities — including boarding boats and fighting off invading
trawlers — has conquered Euro-loyalty, and now Canadian flags
fly on the jetties of Cornish fishing villages and Canadian ministers
are warming the cockles of the fisherfolk’s hearts.
These are very different stories — but they all involve human
beings fighting it out among themselves for their way of life, with
animals as the victims. And there will be more and more such episodes
as the numbers of humans get larger, and the animals in the way increase
and the stocks of fish decrease. More and more for less and less would,
you might think, make people in the Developed World at least stop and
pause and wonder whether we should do something else — such as
change the way we look at the world and its resources. Perhaps we could
eat a little less, distribute a little more fairly, reproduce a little
less often, and educate a little more broadly. While we can all, individually,
make that decision by ourselves by becoming a vegetarian, using less
raw material, recycling more, and reaching out to our neighbors, governments
are a different matter. Do not be surprised if one day soon, we’re
all dragged from our homes and told to clap loudly and long enough
until
all the problems just fall, silenced, from an empty sky.
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