Not to mention what an island littered with poisoned rodents might mean for Anacapa’s native suite of raptors—its barn owls and burrowing owls, its red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, and peregrine falcons—none of them necessarily averse to taking advantage of a dead or dying rat, all of them rigidly protected by law.
In a world of islands under siege by invaders, Anacapa was not by a long shot the most physically intimidating to defend. But on the scales of biological complexity and in the courts of public opinion, it loomed enormous.
The planning alone promised years of work. There would first be an environmental impact statement and reams of permits and paperwork explaining in numbing detail this atypical conservation proposal. If all was approved, the poison was to drop from an industrial grain hopper slung beneath a Bell 206 helicopter, showering bait with computer precision and leaving no rat-worthy patches of refuge on Anacapa unpoisoned. That was the easy part.
For the natives sure to be caught in the firestorm, there would need to be a separate operation. The island mice were to be gathered by the hundreds and caged out of harm’s way until the poison had cleared. The raptors too would be trapped and sequestered, or released on the mainland. As a final layer of fail-safe, the poisoning of Anacapa’s three islets was to be staggered a year apart, allowing recovery of one before the next was bombed.
Such was the plan eventually approved. It was all very avant-garde, employing the latest special weapons and tactics of eradication technology, melded with endangered species husbandry and a hint of high-stakes shell game. It was, after all, the continent’s first-ever rat poisoning to be attempted by air. And that, for better or worse, would attract attention from more than admirers.
SABOTAGE
On October 24, 2001, a week before the first bait was scheduled to hit the ground, field crews conducting last-minute checks spotted two men landing their inflatable dinghy on a beach on East Anacapa. Through binoculars they watched one of them reaching into his backpack and flinging something, as if tossing a Frisbee. Later that evening, when the men found themselves stranded by a broken motor, the Coast Guard paid a visit and took names. Word got back to Park Service headquarters, and the phones started lighting up: Puddicombe’s on the island!
Rob Puddicombe—whose varied résumé included stints as a commercial diver, a bus driver, a volunteer wildlife rehabilitator, and, more important of late, an outspoken critic in the local papers of the impending poisoning of Anacapa—was by then a familiar name to the eradication team. When Howald heard that his crew had seen either Puddicombe or his accomplice throwing something, the toxicologist had an immediate hunch: “Go back and tell me if you find any pellets.”
Howald’s crew found the ground littered with rat kibble, almost identical in appearance to the poison bait awaiting deployment. Lab tests came back confirming his suspicions. The pellets had been infused with vitamin K, a standard remedy for brodifacoum poisoning. “My god,” thought Howald, “these guys are attempting to spread the antidote.”
Puddicombe soon had allies. Five days later the Park Service received notice from the Fund for Animals, a national animal rights organization based in New York, that the Fund and Puddicombe intended to sue. They objected to the killing, to the poisoning of the Anacapa wilderness, as “arbitrary and capricious.” They questioned whether the rat was really a threat to the Xantus’s murrelet.
The project ground to a halt while a federal judge deliberated. “It caught us off guard,” said Kate Faulkner, the Park Service’s chief of natural resources. A few years earlier Faulkner’s agency had felt a similar sting of societal venom while eradicating feral pigs from the neighboring island of Santa Rosa. “We thought we had very compelling reasons for eradicating rats on Anacapa,” she said. “We knew we had to do a little explaining. But we thought rats would be more acceptable than pigs.”
A NICER WAY TO DIE
For those out to save the last of Anacapa’s murrelets, when deciding between an individual rat and an entire colony of seabirds, there was no choice. To allow a work of evolution eons in the making to be extinguished by a ubiquitous species of rat running amok was to stand complicit in a crime against nature.
“To some people it might seem kind of extreme,” said murrelet biologist Darrell Whitworth, whose surveys on Anacapa had become a repeating tour of plundered nests and emptied caves. “But rats are everywhere. This is where murrelets nest. They’re going to nest here, or they’re not going to nest anywhere. I’d much rather see a lot of murrelets here than a lot of rats.”
Not so the rat’s defenders. “And who are humans to call another species invasive, huh? That is a joke,” Puddicombe told a reporter from the Washington Post. “Species go extinct all the time. That’s the philosophical difference. These animals are here and alive now. Their lives have value.”
From somewhere between the poles came a more nuanced question, of conservation with compassion. Asked Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “Is this the most humane way?”
Bekoff came with a rather rare and, some might say, conflicted résumé, as a noted scientist of animal behavior and an outspoken advocate for animal rights. (Early in his career he had dropped out of med school, refusing to kill the house cats required by his experiments.) “I have a really big problem with this carte blanche, overriding theory that invasives should be killed,” said Bekoff. “It’s become a numbers game, the argument being there are so many rats it doesn’t matter if we kill some of them. It’s the veil they hide behind. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘I’m a conservationist, this is how we do it.’ ”
“I’d like to get people thinking about humane alternatives,” he continued. “Too many people just don’t know about the studies.”
The studies to which Bekoff referred were those raising new ethical questions about the conservationists’ lethal new means. It seemed there was more pain and suffering for the cause than was readily appreciated, and much of it inflicted by the workhorse weapon of the rat eradicators.
Brodifacoum had been commonly assumed to be a relatively peaceful way of passing. The poison evoked the image of a woozy rat retiring to its burrow and curling up for the final sleep. Dale Kaukeinen, the man who’d ushered brodifacoum into the limelight of rodent control, who’d watched more than his share of rats die, had come away with tentative assurances. “With internal bleeding I’m sure there is some discomfort,” he said. “But I never saw rats vocalizing or thrashing about.”
Some who had looked a bit closer had come away less comforted by brodifacoum’s reputed kindness. Kate Littin, a physiologist and a technical adviser to the Animal Welfare Group of New Zealand’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, had tested brodifacoum specifically for that elusive quality of humaneness. Littin herself poisoned her rats and documented in detail their demise. Death did not always come comfortably or quickly. As the poison took hold, listless rats took to crouching, backs hunched and heads drooping. Littin watched rats lying half paralyzed for hours, pushing and pulling themselves across the floor. The rats under her observation took, on average, a week to die. Brodifacoum’s delayed onset of fatal symptoms, the very quality that made it so diabolically perfect for overcoming the rats’ hypersensitive danger meter, also made it one of the nastier ways to die.
Littin would later team with her colleague Georgia Mason on a broader investigation of humanity’s anti-rat artillery, which, besides doing little for brodifacoum’s benevolent reputation, revealed how scarce were the sympathies for a rat. Rodents were regularly being gassed with eye-searing acid, crushed by snap traps and mired in glue traps (sometimes skinning themselves in their panic to escape). Trappers would find survivors hours into their ordeals, covered in their own excrement and screaming.
Finally, there was brodifacoum and its family of anticoagulants. Brodifacoum’s painful hemorrhaging and slowness of death, not to mention its tendency of killing unintended victim
s, left the most popular modern weapon in the war on rats flunking its humaneness exam.
“We can see that rodents are routinely subject to cruelty,” Mason and Littin concluded, then adding a measured dash of diplomatic understatement. “This highlights an interesting paradox in the way we treat different animals.”
Littin readily noted that there were times when humaneness might understandably be shelved for more pressing human concerns. This was, after all, a creature accused and guilty of chewing holes through homes, biting infants in cribs, and carrying disease. The rat—as germ-spreading accomplice to the Great Plague—had its vermin’s image burned into humanity’s historical memory. Rodents were every year intercepting as much as a third of the human world’s food supply; people were going hungry for want of fewer rats. For these and a host of other, less compelling reasons, the rat owned a reputation among Western cultures as low as the scale reached. A survey of American college students in the 1970s, rating their fondness for fourteen common animals, ranked the rat dead last, trailing even such cultural favorites as the worm, the shrew, and the spider. And rodents, as the island squads were now making clear, had been abundantly demonstrated to be taking a serious bite out of the world’s roster of life-forms.
But was this an animal whose corporal punishment invariably fit the crime? “For most people it’s a no-brainer,” said Littin. “Don’t worry about poisoning. The line we take, in New Zealand and Australia as well, is rather than totally ignoring animal welfare and saying these pests aren’t worth considering in that regard, at least be aware. Is there something you can use that has less impact on animal welfare?” Littin’s concerns, like Bekoff’s, were colored by a startling body of neuroscience revealing, in the mind of the rat, traits of a disturbingly personal nature.
THE JOY OF RATS
One day in 1997, a psychobiologist named Jaak Panksepp walked into his lab at Bowling Green University and announced, “Let’s go tickle some rats.” Panksepp and his students had for years been eavesdropping on their lab rats, tuning in with ultrasonic sensors and a growing curiosity about the high-pitched chirpings emanating from young rats as they played. What they were hearing they could only describe as rat laughter. So to test, they started tickling. Panksepp and his labmates would reach in with their hands, pouncing playfully, tumbling the little rats, tickling their bellies. The acoustic sensors went ballistic. The rat children were giggling themselves silly.
To Panksepp’s ear it was the gleeful shrieking of kids playing tag in the school yard. In time the rat ticklers needed only to present their hands and the little rats came running as if answering the opening bell of recess.
Panksepp’s curiosity had revealed a disturbingly endearing alter ego of one of the least loved animals not named the mosquito. He had discovered in the rat an emotion once believed to be the sacred province of humans and only lately and begrudgingly bestowed upon such perennial human favorites as the dog and the chimp: Panksepp had discovered in the rat the emotion most aptly defined as joy.
And where there was joy, could such emotions as fear and anxiety, sorrow and empathy, be far away? That question would soon after be answered by the rat’s little cousin, the laboratory mouse, albeit through an ironic mode of sadistic inquiry. Researchers at McGill University, in Canada, had come upon the idea of injecting a mouse with acetic acid, therewith setting the creature to writhing in burning pain. Most important, they made sure its cagemate was watching. The scientists then likewise injected the cagemate. It too writhed, but more frantically than the first, its torture magnified by the memory of having watched its companion suffer the same fate. It was one mouse feeling the other’s pain. In 2006 the researchers reported their astonished observations as the first evidence of any animal beyond humans and their fellow primates showing the emotion of empathy. (No mention was made of whether those administering the pain experienced any empathy of their own.)
The Canadians’ empathic mice only added to a growing canon of research rapidly closing the supposed gap between the lofty universe of human emotions and the less-exalted domain of the animal kingdom’s lower ranks. As early as the 1950s caged rats had been documented deliberately forgoing food to spare their fellow rats an electric shock. When rats witnessed their neighbors being decapitated, their blood pressures soared, their hearts raced.
Inside the heads of some of the most reviled creatures on the planet were sensitive minds harboring emotional kinship to the species so blithely torturing them. So concluded the studies buttressing Littin’s and Bekoff’s concerns, begging questions rarely discussed in eradication circles. Death had become accepted as a necessary ingredient of the conservation prescription, the mantra among the island saviors being that the ends justified the means. Interlopers were attacked, natives rescued, mission accomplished. To spare the island invader its singular pain of death was to inflict eternal suffering on the endless procession of its victims.
But it wasn’t merely rats suffering the big-picture rationale. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s ongoing eradication of arctic foxes from the Aleutian Islands, widely hailed as one of the paragons of island restoration, had been inflicting pain on both aggressors and victims. Ed Bailey, who had led the campaign for years, had often found himself in the predicament of a wildlife admirer obliged not only to kill but to work beside those who liked nothing better.
“I didn’t relish eradicating foxes,” said Bailey. “I knew it had to be done. But some of the people who went along—some of the Animal Damage Control people—they just got a big bang out of blowing away foxes. It was kind of disturbing to me. Some of the people in the fox camps just loved shooting things.”
Callousness notwithstanding, the deaths by bullet were often merciful in their relative quickness. Those by leghold trap were often not. It was a dirty little secret among the fox-killing crews that the ethical standard of checking traps early and often did not apply in the Aleutian frontier. The Aleutian fox campaign was a bare-bones business of lowly paid trappers living in tents on lonely wind-battered islands on the edge of nowhere. The idea of checking every trap every day was understandably scoffed at by those facing daily marathons of boulder beaches and mountains of waist-high tundra. Bailey commonly came upon foxes dead in the traps, with untold hours and days of suffering exposed to the Aleutian elements. Foxes that didn’t starve or succumb to exposure were sometimes cannibalized by their neighbors. Litters of pups whose nursing mothers didn’t return home died a slow death in the den. “Leghold traps are cruel,” said Bailey, “no question about it. They can say they’re checking their traps ten times a day, but there’s still a lot of pain involved.”
Bailey in his tenure would come to whiff the scent of indifference from both sides of the ethical divide. In the 1990s the Aleutian fox project had a run-in with animal rights advocates from the Sea Shepherd Society. The Shepherds, better known for more high-profile escapades ramming whaling vessels and confronting clubbers of baby seals, had caught wind of the feds’ fox trapping. The killing was cruel, they charged. The solution they demanded was to live-trap all the foxes and move them. Bailey, pondering the practical absurdity of their demands, called their bluff. When he offered to take the protesters out to experience firsthand the breadth and brutality of the Aleutian environs, the Shepherds turned tail and abandoned the foxes to their fates.
Bailey’s only sure sanctuary of conscience was to remind himself repeatedly of the bottom line. “It was a dirty job that had to be done,” he said. “But I had to look at the bigger part of the mission, of how many seabirds were alive because of what we were doing.”
As for the vanquishers of Anacapa’s rats, Howald and company would be saddled with the same imperfect solution to an inescapable dilemma. “Death is never easy,” said Howald. “But we don’t take it lightly. Unfortunately, this is the tool of choice we have.”
RESTORING BALANCE
One month after the quarreling parties of Anacapa came to legal blows, the federal judge handed down the court�
�s opinion: The eradicators had followed the rules; they were free to proceed.
But by now the scuffle had gathered onlookers. Newspapers from Los Angeles to San Francisco picked up on the row between the murrelets’ and the rats’ defenders. Rhetoric-laden editorials and caustic letters to the editor frayed nerves. Anacapa rangers took to arming themselves with flak vests, handguns, and batons. Howald found himself looking under his car at the end of the day.
On December 5, 2001, the eradicators’ helicopter lifted off with an industrial grain hopper and began methodically spraying East Anacapa with brodifacoum-laced pellets. Within hours the deed was done. After a few days of mop-up the island conservationists gathered in their rustic field quarters and popped the champagne. Said Tershy, raising a glass, “I think we made conservation history today.”
Over the following year the checkup crews would find no signs of rats remaining on East Anacapa. But neither would they find any signs of the Anacapa deer mice that had been left outside. About a hundred birds were found dead too, ten of them raptors.
But from the death eventually came rebirth. In the spring following the poisoning, the captive deer mice were released, to soon replenish their island to capacity. Anacapa’s cohort of young side-blotched lizards and slender salamanders had prospered particularly well during their first winter without rats. And that summer, in a cave where no Xantus’s murrelet had fledged for the last three years running, surveyors found a nest bearing a healthy egg—the surprisingly rapid onset of a long comeback.
The following year’s clearing of Anacapa’s middle and west islets amounted to anticlimax. Again the helicopter sprayed; again the editorialists and letter writers blared foul. Deer mice, raptors, songbirds, and rats all suffered, but only the rats to the very last. And soon enough Anacapa had begun to resemble a more pristine past. By 2003 the number of murrelets nesting there had nearly doubled.
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