Title: The ecological origins and consequences of the rodent bait station
[C Kelty 2023 Medical Anthropology 42(4)] -- The bait station has been central to an industry of rodent management for close to 70 years. It is now also at the centre of a contemporary ecological crisis in which a range of creatures – hawks, owls, native rodents – suffer collateral damage from its widespread installation through the overconsumption and bio-accumulation of anticoagulant rodenticides.
In this article I tell the story of the bait station: where it came from, why it works the way it does, and the consequences of this design for the present.
This paper documents this relatively understudied system of rodent management, in order to explain why the apparent necessity of killing rats led to an ecological design of the bait station system that has created an ecological crisis. This apparent contradiction is due to the fact that “ecological” thinking – thinking through the relations of biological organisms among other plants and animals entangled in an environment – is actually very good at establishing how to poison rodents. It clarifies how to get them to consume poison, how to get poison into rodents and not into other animals, how and where to place poison to be effective, how much to use over what area and time period, and so on.
Both the design of the rodent control system and the crisis that has emerged are “ecological”—and this confusion means it is necessary to go beyond the word or the theory and look instead at the details of a mostly overlooked object.
A proposed “ecological” solution (implicitly a “nontoxic” solution) is not a solution, in the sense of an end to a problem. The crisis created by the rodent bait station cannot be fixed by being more environmentally friendly, sustainable, or ecological – because it is already an ecological solution ...
