New Zealanders have a reputation for being very reasonable and moderate people, but when something gets between their eyebrows there is no one to get them off the donkey. They tried, taking advantage of their insular and remote condition, that the pandemic did not arrive, for which they closed the doors of the country and for a long time they did not let anyone in or out, causing serious family dramas and making –in the opinion of many– that the cure was worse than the disease. And now, along the same lines, they have proposed to exterminate all the rats in the country. Not to reduce their number, but to annihilate the species. There is literally not one left.
Miramar, a neighborhood of Wellington (the country’s capital, 200,000 inhabitants), has already launched Operation Extermination with a group of several dozen volunteers, many of them children, who trap rodents with peanut butter (a great temptation) and anticoagulant poisons. Infrared alarms in sewers and other strategic locations alert you to the location of the rats, which are mapped to an internet “go for them” location in no time.
It is a pilot project that will be extended to the whole country, with the objective that by 2050, coinciding with the elimination of the carbon footprint, there will be no rats that complicate the existence of native birds. New Zealand was the last great land mass to be inhabited by humans and, 85 million years ago, before separating from a supercontinent, birds roamed freely and had a privileged life, without external threats, with which they could have their nests on the ground and did not even need to know how to fly. Good ‘ol times!
Foreigners, in this case the Polynesians, brought the rats in the 13th century, and as a result twenty-six million native birds were killed, a third of the total. Others, such as the tui honeyeater and the sooty shearwater, have had to be subjected to protection programs so that they do not become extinct. Its enemies are not only rodents, but also ferrets, opossums, weasels, goats, deer, rabbits and even domestic animals such as dogs and cats (which no one proposes to exterminate, at least for now, because it would mount a… ).
Until now, only the island of South Georgia (a British Overseas Territory in the Atlantic Ocean) has attempted to completely eliminate rats, with limited results (some are occasionally sighted), and that is only 170 kilometers away. length, compared to New Zealand’s 1,600. The experiment, however, is going to be followed with enormous interest in New York, London, Paris, Edinburgh and other metropolises on the planet where these animals, especially in the summer and with the heat, constitute a real plague.
New Zealanders, however, are divided on this zero tolerance policy for rats and mice, just as they were on zero tolerance for covid. Both for practical and ethical reasons. There are those who think that it is an impossible objective, just as in the end it was to prevent the entry of the virus, which ended up sneaking in despite the virtual closure of entire cities in the Chinese style (it was one of the factors in the loss of popularity of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her eventual resignation). And there are those who appeal to a moral dilemma and consider that man should not interfere with nature to the point of destroying some species to protect others, no matter how much the birds are cuter than the rodents.
The rats that are annihilated within the Wellington Extermination operation are autopsied in laboratories, to catalog their sex, their age, their weight and if they died by falling into a trap or swallowing an anticoagulant poison. Perhaps one day, when there are none left, it will be a priceless document on an extinct species. Less controversial is the strategy used in other parts of the country (especially islands, since a rat can only swim about eight hundred meters), consisting of creating bird sanctuaries where it has been verified that there are no rodents left, entire blocks with electrified fences which even people can only access through double security doors, like a bank safe. They may seem like very radical measures, but when New Zealanders set their minds to something… Things of living in the real back of the world.
