From mgs@aae.wisc.edu Sat Oct 23 15:18:50 1999 Date: Fri, 28 May 1999 17:41:41 -0500 From: "Michele Gale-Sinex/CIAS, UW-Madison" To: sanet-mg@amani.ces.ncsu.edu Subject: Rats Howdy, all-- Phil Gilman wrote, in response to my posting about composting in an urban setting: > So a few rodents get into the compost- woopdy doo- What difference > does it really make? Get a cat or dog- that will take care of the > rats- > > just my 2 farm cents (not worth much anymore) Phil, you are presenting the viewpoint that I mentioned yesterday: that strategies and technologies that work in rural areas must also work in urban ones. When I say urban, I'm not talking a college town, like Mark's --Amherst, Mass.--nestled on the plain between the Berkshires and scenic route 202, sprinkled with some of the Seven Sisters. I'm talking a megalopolis of tens of millions of people, stretching from Boston to D.C. A few rodents? Kate wrote from Philadelphia. Urban areas like Philadelphia have rat populations in the millions. They live in steam tunnels, electrical conduit tunnels, subways, sewers, and other extensive, hidden, human-made burrows. Not to mention houses, buildings, and other structures. Female Norway rats (/Rattus norvegicus/) have three to seven litters per year, each litter, 6 to 12 pups. Within 24 or 48 hours of giving birth, female Norways are capable of being in heat again. One rat, one year, up to 84 new rats. Roof rats (/Rattus rattus/) are nearly as prodigious. They reproduce pretty much as fast as they eat. Feed a city rat for a few months, and you add hundreds of rats to the ecosystem. Equally voracious, equally prodigious. Rats can swim rivers, fall 50 feet without being injured, chew thru electrical wires and short out a circuit without being harmed...city rats have few or no predators, and your average house-bound, complacent urban dog or cat isn't going to tangle with them. But even if we could count on this UberPet to go a-ratting in the city...how many dogs and cats do you think it would take to control rat populations of this size? How many rat-hunting dogs and cats would be temperamentally fit to live in the confines and constraints of an urban setting--it's not like letting them run around the farm, you know. When I lived downriver from Philadelphia, there were rats of a size and temperament that took down dogs and cats for breakfast. Sometimes in gangs. Children too, but I don't want to tell emergency room stories right now. George Orwell wasn't making that up, in /1984/. He knew about rats from people's experiences in the London slums. You may not see "a few rodents" as a problem in rural areas. The urban ecosystem is quite different. For instance, in 1347, a few rodents disembarked from Genoese merchant ships docked in Sicily after returning from the Black Sea. Within a year, bubonic plague outbreaks had occurred in Marseilles, Paris, England, Germany, and the Netherlands. Within five years, 25 million people--a third of the population of Europe--had died. Some cities lost 2/3rds of their populations. China is believed to have lost over 35 million people at that time. Plague bacilli (/Yersinia pestis/) are carried by fleas, which are carried by rats. Within three to four days of being bitten by a plague-carrying flea, a person who died from the plague would experience high fevers and body pain, with black swellings of the lymph nodes coming soon thereafter. Within a day or two, the swellings burst, and the infected person vomited blood. The person then died. Rats also carry ticks, and thus tick-borne diseases (such as the spirochetes that cause Lyme disease). In addition, a study in the mid-1980s found that 12% of urban rats in Philadelphia and 64% in Baltimore tested seropositive for Seoul virus, a Hantaan-like virus that can produce a hemorrhagic fever, but more often a renal syndrome. (For reference, see http://www.uct.ac.za/microbiology/ebolaess.html) Rats also carry murine typhus, and spread salmonella, leptospirosis, and trichinosis. Where they come into contact with food, they can spread all these diseases, as well as hantaviruses. Rats live only a year. This combined with their reproductive capacity means that any life form (virus, insect, bacterium, etc.) that can move quickly from host to host can always find new rats to serve as vectors, even if it is hugely deadly. That is, the colonizing life form can kill its host...but new hosts are quickly supplied. So. There in a nutshell is the woopdy-doo difference about rats in cities. They are like cockroaches, McDonalds, tax lawyers, and SUVs: there is no such thing as "a few" of them in major urban areas. Once again, I'd like to underscore this issue of assuming that things that work on farms must also work in cities. We've all seen what happens when the opposite assumption gets made. Appropriate technology means, in part, appropriately place-based technology. We who advocate for food production and sustainable living in urban areas have got to be careful in our thinking about such things, if we expect to see the cities re-greened with food. We've got to know our urban spaces as well as rural farmers know theirs. I liked Ronald Nigh's off-list observation that chickens are ideal recyclers for cities: small, eat anything, and quickly convert it to earthworm fodder. But thanks to the poor adaptation of poultry systems to urban environments in the early parts of this century, people came to believe that they were, by necessity, dirty, smelly, noisy creatures. peace misha <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Michele Gale-Sinex, communications manager Center for Integrated Ag Systems UW-Madison College of Ag and Life Sciences Voice: (608) 262-8018 FAX: (608) 265-3020 http://www.wisc.edu/cias/ >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Pressure? Pressure was when I was a shoeshine boy trying to make it to America. --Sammy Sosa To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest". All messages to sanet-mg are archived at: http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail From mgs@aae.wisc.edu Sat Oct 23 15:26:45 1999 Date: Thu, 27 May 1999 17:00:00 -0500 From: "Michele Gale-Sinex/CIAS, UW-Madison" To: sanet-mg@amani.ces.ncsu.edu Subject: Re: Small Composter Howdy, all-- Mark from CISA wrote: > Get four pallets from a local factory. Make and upright box. > Toss in your stuff. If you have enough material and the right > ration (of veg scraps to leaves to grass clippings) you should have > no smell problem. > > In my experience this setup is way cheaper (free) and way easier > to deal with than the various plastic doo-dads sold for lots of $$ > in the gardening catalogs. A few observations based on my experience in urban and rural ag. A lidless composter in a big city can draw rats, mice, raccoons, possums, cats, starlings, sparrows, pigeons, maggots, and other colonizers. This isn't a situation you or your neighbors would appreciate if you live in Kate's part of the world--say, a row home in South Philly, Manayunk, Frankford, or Darby. You haven't lived till rats or possums start fighting over eggshells and vegie waste in your tiny backyard at 3 a.m. in the city. Nor till your neighbors take it up with you as an issue. :^] As for a scrap-pallet composter, city rats can chew thru wooden pallets faster than you can say "Big Brother, Room 101." These are animals for whom there are effectively no predators, and who breed in direct proportion to how much they consume. When they reach overpopulation and get hungry, they go on attack. When they are in some sort of population balance, they still carry disease. Open composters with kitchen wastes are basically rat feeding stations, in the city. In the swampy heat of a Philadelphia July/August, porous wood (like pallet soft pine or poplar) can absorb waste liquids...and in a few days put off a smell like nothing I've ever experienced here in Madison. Neighbors then associate composting with the smell of rotting garbage. In addition, some industrial pallets are treated with chemicals--or have had chemicals leaked onto them (depending on their source)--that I wouldn't want leaching into my garden. While plastic may seem unsustainable...it is also an enduring material. A good friend of mine in Wilmington, DE, bought a "green magic" plastic barrel composter about 15 years ago that she's still using. She paid maybe $100 for it then. Not only has it been an effective tool since, at a cost of, what, $6.75 per year--she's made other productive use of the time it'd take for her to rebuild scrap-material composters in the interim. It was made of a UV-resistant material which has faded some over the years...but is still hanging in as a tool. Not many wooden tools hold up that long in the city or urban shadow. (Or even in rural areas--I'm thinking of the last time I fabricated a wooden drawbar for a drag....) Unless the wood is treated with chemicals. Finally, not only do tools in urban settings have to withstand the elements--heat, cold, UV--they also are exposed to higher proportions of industrial chemicals, acid rain, etc. I'm all for the scavenging school of food production. Making do, recycling materials, etc. However, careful technology assessment can lead to the conclusion that a $70 investment in a polymer composter is a good choice in some situations. One reason food production has moved out of the cities is that people transplanted rural technologies to cities without adapting them for their new Places. From a policy perspective, it was viewed as easier to ban the technologies, and food production systems in general, as problems than adapt them. So that today, you can keep a yard full of honking, sniveling, inbred Rottweilers...but not a few chickens. Finding the right combination of production systems, supporting technologies, and urban food production policies will take some work...and thought. Some of the tools sold for urban or suburban gardening can surely be put in the category of "doo-dads" (implying nonessential). But I think we need to do careful technology assessments before concluding that. The constraints on the urban farmer are very unlike those on other farmers. Sometimes the thought that goes into the production of a certain tool--like these composters--is careful, and designed to ease those constraints. So that part of the cost of these tools is technology in the purest sense: the word comes from Latin /tekhne-/, meaning skill. peace mish <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Michele Gale-Sinex, communications manager Center for Integrated Ag Systems UW-Madison College of Ag and Life Sciences Voice: (608) 262-8018 FAX: (608) 265-3020 http://www.wisc.edu/cias/ >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Dennis: Anarcho-syndicalism is a way of *preserving* freedom! His Wife: Oh, Dennis, *forget* about freedom! We 'aven't got enough mud! To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest". All messages to sanet-mg are archived at: http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail From nrboone@roadrunner.com Sat Oct 23 15:31:46 1999 Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 09:52:57 -0600 (MDT) From: Nathan/Rachna Boone To: sanet-mg@ces.ncsu.edu Subject: Hanta virus in rodent manure Dear sanet, Thanks to many of you who responded to my question about using rodent manure from cage-raised pet store varieties of hamsters, gerbils, rats and mice. A large concern from many was the possible hanta virus linked to mice feces and urine. I contacted the Infectious Disease unit of UNM hospital in Albuquerque that handles all hanta virus cases in the state. They told me that ONLY wild Deer mice carry the hanta virus. Pet store mice do not carry hanta virus. However, the state vet said that rodents carry several GI pathogens that affect humans including salmonella. Thus, all rodent manure should be composted for a year to eliminate GI pathogens. Thanks to all! Nathan Boone Agricultural Consultant 200-B Callecita Place Santa Fe, NM 87501 Tel: 505.992.0649 Fax: 508.302.7761 Email: nrboone@roadrunner.com To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest". All messages to sanet-mg are archived at: http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail