A Typical Animal Lover Email
How would you respond?
Email of the Weekend
Hi,
I feel extremely compelled to tell you that I find your business extremely offensive. You’re subjecting rats to extreme amount of pain and torture. being attacked by an animal to be killed is extremely violent and inappropriate. Also the fact that you’re subjecting your dogs to diseases and infections that they can pick up from conflict from the animal bites/scrapes/cuts is shameful, ask any vet. we live in a sophisticated country at this point and I think what you’re doing is completely inappropriate and you should feel terrible about yourself. I’ll be sending your ad to the animal welfare agencies and also animal activist clubs. I wish no good luck for your company and I hope it fails quickly. I also hope that no harm comes to any of the animals involved because you’re basically just having them fight each other and that’s very very uneducated.
Disappointingly,
Rachael
My Response –
Rachel,
Thanks for the time you took to write a email.
My personal guess is that you do not know much about country living or farming. Growing your own food and meat is good, and eggs too. Unfortunately with hay and grain and other food around, you end up dealing with rats. This especially happens when people that have no country living skills start little hobby farms and homestead.
If you have not dealt with a infestation level of rats first hand, they you also likely do not have any experience how aggressive a Norway rat is. Ive been called to farms where they are killing baby and adult chickens, and also to farms where they are chewing on baby cows. This is not even to mention that feces in the feed can cause animals to abort and other issues. They are no joke and they also cause damage by undermining foundations and can cause buildings to fall down eventually.
The next thing I would mention is that you should go and research rat poison. I had a dog poisoned and that is one of the reasons I started catching rats. It was through that experience that I learned a rat takes 3-7 days to die while in terrible pain and bleeding from the internal organs. If that is not bad enough then any animal, hawk or owl that eats the rat will also ingest all the poison and die. There was bobcats and mountain lions this year in CA that were tagged animals in studies that died from just that, there are studies that show almost all the raptors hit by cars have ingested rat poisons.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1111-poisoned-puma-20151112-story.html
I work sometimes in education talking to groups about the danger of rat poison in the environment and also with children. I forgot to mention that certified organic farmers can not use poison.
http://www.raptorsarethesolution.org/
While we may live in a sophisticated country as evidenced by sophisticated Donald Trump ? We are less connected to nature and our food than we ever have been before. I am not ashamed of myself, and the conclusions you draw are not based in the reality of who I am, or have anything to do with me or the work that I do with dogs.
I wish you all the best of luck in love and life.
Jreed
P.S. All the dead rats that I catch are donated to raptors
4 Comments
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What a thoughtful and informative reply. Thank you for the education and work you’re doing.
cheers
Bravo! I used to live in the home that my father had built by hand 65 years ago. His old workshop had a concrete foundation that had been completely destroyed by rats burrowing under it. I eventually tore up the concrete floor which was by now just broken concrete chunks and left it as a dirt floor to avoid the tripping hazard. However, the rats still thrived. We were always fastidious about not leaving out food sources, but nature is a food source. It was an old neighborhood with lots of nature. Pecan trees, Oak trees, pears, figs, Magnolia tree seeds, all of these provided year round food and the 60 year old bamboo stand provided cover. These were the things that made living there beautiful, so getting rid of them wasn’t the option. I had two dogs that I loved deeply, so I didn’t want to risk poison. Also, we had owls and Red Tailed Hawks that routinely hunted the small animals in the fields surrounding us and there was no way that I could justify the risk of harming these majestic creatures. Rat traps were ineffective and the glue traps that we once tried were so inhumane, we never did that again! My solution – Letting my dogs hunt the rats. They found the nests and I moved things out of the way so they could access them. It worked beautifully. The rats were killed within seconds and my dogs were never injured. Much more humane than other options and the dogs had a blast! Thanks for the good work.
are you on social media? Thanks for sharing th story and experience