Rodent welfare in the name of prevention of cruelty to animals?

 

According to Animal Welfare Board of India, Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairy, Govt of India letter No. 9-16/2019-20-PCA of 16th Nov 2020, killing rodents using glue traps is inhuman, as it inflicts unnecessary pain and suffering to the rodents. It is a recurring cruel practice. And this is against the Prevention of cruelty to Animals Act 1960.

Rodents cause damage to crops as well as in storage of food grains. I remember probably in 1970s my relative telling me that their wheat crop was totally destroyed by rodents. I am not sure of status of rodents causing losses in agriculture or carrying diseases to the humans. Surely, way back in 1994 that we had plague in Surat and some people died, part of the blame was on rodents spreading disease. 

 I know of one method of trapping rodents by baiting them in the wire-mesh cage and releasing them some distance from your home. It is humane, but unethical and disrespectful of fellow citizens for whom you may be creating a new nuisance. I am not sure if acute poisoning with zinc phosphide or so-called poisoning through continuous bleeding by rodenticide like warfarin is not causing them pain or suffering like glue traps. I have not heard from the rodents the pains that they suffer, nor I have read any papers on pain measurement in rodents. Surely, The Animal Welfare Board knows better. This letter suggests that there are other humane methods of controlling them. Unfortunately, the above letter does not specify which of methods are humane in controlling rodents.

Some communities all over the world like to eat rats. In India, Adi in the North east and Erula and Korava in the South are expert rat catchers and eaters. There are also Musahars, rat catchers in the North especially in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal who eat rats during dire conditions, as report in the dueexpress.com on 11th September 2020 suggests. A report of the 10th July 2016 in Hindu suggests that rat trapping is an efficient method of preventing losses and even recovering hoarded food grains from burrows than killing rats with poisons, as found in the DST project on the subject. And this may be considered a very humane method, as it does not involve conventional rat poisoning.

 



Rat catchers, photo Rom Whitakar photo credit: mail.pic.dcv from Hindu report

 

At the extreme end, is also a fact that some communities for e.g. in Rajasthan worship rats. There is Karni Mata Mandir (temple) (photo credit: Wikipedia) in Deshnoke, 30 km away from Bikaner where rats are worshipped. About 25000 black rats live and are fed here. Legend has it that son of Karni Mata drowned in the pond. Karni Mata, devotee, implored the Death God, Yama to bring back to life her son. Yama relented later and reincarnated her son as rat. The devotees worshipping at this temple believe that eating food nibbled by rats is honour bestowed on them.

 


Karni Mata temple-photocredit Wikipedia.org

 

So, it is question of striking a balance between rodent control with human and inhuman methods-in the absence of clarity of what constitutes human or inhuman method. Both ends in death. Is death painful, cruel? Rats are not human to tell you. In the end, it is whose welfare that you intend to look for, while managing their population not exterminating them. Rats or Humans!

 

Jai Ho.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How robust is our pesticide policy? A case of waiting period or post-harvest interval for safe consumption of produce

Image
Top: Saurashtra farmer who was keen to offer us a gift of maize, but for spray a day before; Bottom: Ready to spray with mixture on cotton.   As early as 1985, India recognised importance of integrated pest management to achieving optimal crop protection in its agricultural policy. This policy also envisaged reduction in the use of synthetic pesticides and increase in eco-friendly safe tactics in the agroecosystem. Safety to all is pivotal of crop protection policy. However, synthetic pesticides remained the bulwark of integrated pest management in agriculture. In fact, consumption of synthetic pesticides has increased over the past two decades from about 45,000 tons to about 60,000 tons. And hence, it has become necessary that we use pesticides judiciously so that farmers save their farm produce from the ravages of pests and at the same time, consumers get foodgrains and other farm produce that are safe to eat. Some years back, I was reading the data on major uses of pesticides, e
Read more

Probit Analysis of bioassays: Sure, you are seriously talking about it

Image
    After reviewing a manuscript, I thought of talking to my friend who works in the prestigious Government institution to know as to how he estimates various parameters of toxicity like LC50, fiducial limits [FL] or Confidence intervals [CI], intercept. And this reminded me of my days as a M.Sc. student when I would do these calculations using a Facit® manual calculator on a tabulated sheet that our insect toxicology teacher, Dr. B.S. Atri would provide us. It was tedious work involving filling of columns like concentrations, log concentrations, % mortality, their transformation into probits, weighting coefficients, empirical probits, expected probits, working probits and other parameters meticulously up to three decimal points until we came to an equation, y=a+bx, where y is 5.0, a, an intercept and b, a slope and x (log LC50) is what we will calculate. For 95% FL, we used two equations, m1=m-1.96 √ V and m2=m+.6 √ V where m1, m2, lower and upper FLs of LC50, √ square root of varian
Read more

Pheromone-based Crop Protection: Mating Disruption technology needs many researchable inputs to succeed sustainably

Image
Moths of the pink bollworm in the pheromone trap Farmers' gathering: pheromone MD formulation, PB knot tied on stem of cotton larva of the pink bollworm feeding inside the raw cotton boll It was in mid-1980s and early 1990s that the American bollworm caused havoc to cotton production in the country leading some farmers to commit suicides in the erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and others, as they had taken loans in expectation of bumper yields. Farmers did not believe that this bollworm can be a key pest, reducing their cotton production significantly. The pest insect had developed resistance to most of insecticides used in cotton and thrived well. Insecticide-based control of pests was a big failure, affecting environment and health of all stakeholders. Everyone scrambled for solution. Botanicals like neem, microbials like nucleopolyhedrosis virus, and parasites like Trichogramma chilonis were reported to be alternate to insecticides. The need-based use of insect
Read more