It’s not exactly news that some environmentalists, mourning an Arcadia that never existed or nursing a misanthropy that most certainly does, are remarkably sentimental about “mother” nature, not least when it comes to living with “her” trickier offspring. We are now supposed to learn to live with mountain lions, wolves, and so on in somewhat unnerving proximity. But nuts though that it is, I can see, for aesthetic reasons, why some people might want that option.
On the other hand, this story, reported by Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, strikes me as truly demented (or as a rationalization of failure):
There are said to be 6 million rats in Paris. I met one last week when I was retrieving some winter clothes from a bag in my cellar. Neither of us was particularly keen to make the other’s acquaintance.
Such a brief encounter may not please the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. In the summer her office announced the establishment of a committee to study how the city’s three million human inhabitants can learn to “cohabit” with their furry neighbors.
Animal rights’ groups and green politicians expressed their satisfaction that the societal scourge of rat shaming is finally being challenged. Paris councillor Douchka Markovic has said the word “rat” is pejorative and she wants them renamed “surmulots.” She added that rats are “useful” in the ecosystem.
One initiative already underway is a research project involving the Natural History Museum, the Pasteur Institute and the Sorbonne, the purpose of which is to “combat prejudices to help Parisians live better with rats.” What form this unconscious bias training will take has yet to be revealed.
Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal in March:
On my way to take a walk in the Père Lachaise cemetery, from where I could hear the sound of riots, sirens, and the discharge of teargas canisters in the distance, I passed through a small park with a notice on its railings announcing a municipal campaign against rats. Inside the park were lots of the kind of black plastic boxes in which rat poison is placed to lure the rodents to their death. The boxes are there, but often not the poison: they are Potemkin rat traps….
It turns out that not everyone in the population or on the city council is unequivocally opposed to rats, according to an article in Le Figaro. The rat problem has become ideological, like practically all others. This broader development may be indirectly related to the downfall of the Soviet Union, after which the ideologically minded had to satisfy themselves with a cause other than Marxism, and found one wherever they could.
The Paris councillor and advisor to the mayor on animal questions, Douchka Marcovitch, a member of the Parti animaliste, argues that rats, far from being a nuisance, are auxiliaries in the disposal of waste. “We estimate that rats eat several tons of waste per day,” she said. “Contrary to received ideas, they are assets rather than liabilities in effectively maintaining the cleanliness of cities. We must change the paradigm. We should be asking ourselves about the way of life of rats, so that we can find efficacious and ethical ways of dealing with them.”
Some go further. The pressure group Paris animaux zoopolis (PAZ) has put up posters saying “Let us overturn the clichés about rats!” In pink writing, the posters declare:
Emotions, intelligence, altruism, suffering, social life . . . we share the essentials with them. . . .
According to the PAZ, we need to learn “to share the urban space with non-human animals in a peaceful fashion . . . Today, in its current conception, urban space is exclusively reserved to humans. We must end this anthropocentric idea. The separatist policy conducted by the Paris council with regard to rats, between those in the parks and those in the sewers, is unjust. By what right do we deprive certain animals of all access to the light of day?”
… Not everyone is so pro-rat, of course. A qualified rat-catcher (and in my experience, rat-catchers are always interesting people to talk to), Jacques d’Allemagne, said:
“Sometimes there are so many [rats] in the parks that gardeners take their retirement. I have seen public housing in which the inhabitants are so afraid [of rats] that they do not take their garbage down to the bins but throw in out of the windows. When you don’t bring a solution to people, they do what they can for themselves. They try recipes that they find on the Internet: meatballs with ground glass, for example, with all the consequences that can have for domestic animals.”
One of the pleasures, incidentally, of reading Theodore Dalrymple are the glimpses into other aspects of his life. So there’s the mention of a walk in the Père Lachaise cemetery. A good cemetery is always worth a leisurely visit, and Père Lachaise is one of the best.
And then there’s the casual reference to the pleasures of rat-catchers’ company, something that was obviously not a one-off: “In my experience, rat-catchers are always interesting people to talk to”.
Probably so.
But back to the article:
As for the National Academy of Medicine, it issued a communiqué: , which read in part:
“Whether called Rattus norvegicus, brown rat or Norway rat, it is the most harmful of human commensal species due to its great adaptability, its food requirements, its intense prolificity and, especially, the bacterial, viral and parasitic zoonoses of which it can be the vector . . .
It is important to recall that the rat remains a threat to human health because of the many zoonoses transmitted by its exoparasites, its droppings, its bites or its scratches. . . . Rats’ urine can contaminate the environment with leptospira [of which there were 700 cases last year in France, 70 of them fatal].”
No doubt the Parti animaliste would say that such fears are overblown. What, after all, are 0.01 percent of all human deaths to set against the lives and suffering of millions of creatures that, according to the PAZ, even laugh when tickled?
More pro-rat propaganda here from PAZ. Cheery, empathetic little chaps, it seems.
And so the West sinks further into madness.