I think your comment was intended for the original posters, Gabriele James or Andrew Fisher, either of whom know way more than me, since my knowledge of this is from reading this post.
You might want to directly reply to their post so they can see your thoughts.
Uh, some quick thoughts anyways:
It’s sad when one mammal’s welfare (humans) is at odds with another mammal’s welfare (rats) but I feel more trust in a species-specific welfare agenda when I have info about the trade offs to other species in their ecosystem.
I think your premise is that there has to be a trade off between rats or humans, but I don’t think this is the premise of likely interventions or the view of the original posters.
Importantly, I think one intervention is the reasonable reduction of urban rat populations, e.g. removing garbage and food sources, so we don’t have a lot of rats who suffer.
(Note that there’s a little micro-history in wild animal welfare where some people got the sense that the outcome of the whole idea was removing animal populations in general, but this is basically too simplistic. As far as I can tell, wild animal welfare people like animals and nature, you know, like normal people do).
Do urban rats spread disease and/or bite people? I was surprised that those potential risks didn’t figure into the survey or people’s responses and attitudes. What are the risks to the humans of letting rats live among them? If there are real health risks to people from having a large rat population around, I would expect a culture would be wise to use stories of witchcraft to spread the wisdom that rats are “bad news” to human health.
Well, South Africa has a really vibrant culture and I can’t imagine how to characterize it, but well, my guess is that there is strong sentiment against rats among some.
As the OP said, there was “pro-suffering”, people wanted to see rats suffer (despite the fact rats have no control and literally just want to eat to survive).
I think your comment was intended for the original posters, Gabriele James or Andrew Fisher, either of whom know way more than me, since my knowledge of this is from reading this post.
You might want to directly reply to their post so they can see your thoughts.
Uh, some quick thoughts anyways:
I think your premise is that there has to be a trade off between rats or humans, but I don’t think this is the premise of likely interventions or the view of the original posters.
Importantly, I think one intervention is the reasonable reduction of urban rat populations, e.g. removing garbage and food sources, so we don’t have a lot of rats who suffer.
(Note that there’s a little micro-history in wild animal welfare where some people got the sense that the outcome of the whole idea was removing animal populations in general, but this is basically too simplistic. As far as I can tell, wild animal welfare people like animals and nature, you know, like normal people do).
Well, South Africa has a really vibrant culture and I can’t imagine how to characterize it, but well, my guess is that there is strong sentiment against rats among some.
As the OP said, there was “pro-suffering”, people wanted to see rats suffer (despite the fact rats have no control and literally just want to eat to survive).