Traps, lamps, poison and fire
Posted 08.31.2012 at 1:09 pm
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About a month ago, my apartment had some unwelcome visitors in the form of cream-colored little worms writhing about on my kitchen and bathroom floor. Maggots. It was deeply unsettling, but, as always, science was on my side, with its pressurized cans of grocery store poison, specifically calibrated for my particular pest problem. Sure, we were sweeping up scores of dead fly bodies for weeks, but at least they were dead.
This week's archive gallery takes a look at all the different ways we humans like to destroy the creatures that bother us. Sometimes we poison them, sometimes we let an aesthetically-pleasing electrical lamp zap them from a comfortable distance away. Sometimes we build clever traps and sometimes we BURN THEM WITH FIRE.
Click here to explore the gallery.
Enter the gallery above to take a journey with us down the lane of pest control's past. We'll take a pit stop to go a-ratting with some old timey techniques, scrunch our nose a bit at our unfortunate obsession with DDT and emerge with a slew of options at the ready the next time we find ourselves confronted with unwanted houseguests.
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Why is Popsci still on a DDT witch hunt? By now we should all know that the eagle egg study was a sham in which the eagles were fed a substandard diet lacking in calcium, the concerns over cancerous effects were 180 off mark ( a study showed that daily consumption of DDT by prison inmates decreased their propensity for cancer by 50% compared to the average population control), and all of the outrage over DDT was caused by a book called Silent Spring, written by a nutjob and pushed a fact when it was in fact a work of fiction.
Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that covering your dog in DDT would be far less harmful than doing what the vet wants you to do on a monthly basis. The leading brands of flea and tick protection for your pets are based on the drug called fipronil. This drug is neurotoxin to not just bugs, but almost all life on the planet, and it is a long lasting and lingering drug. This is the same chemical used in most professional termiticides and perimeter treatments. It is also a suspected culprit in our honey bee declines. Oh, and if your pet is sensitive to this chem, you just might have to watch your friend convulse on the ground and die. I've seen a vet administer the dose for a dog one pound heavier than what the dog was, and it died in a matter of minutes. Please PopSci, stop your witch hunt and get on with real objective reporting of facts instead of a MSM approach to science.