Don‘t know what sparked my interest in rats.
May have been reading James Herbert’s The Rats as a teenager. Or more likely the joy when I got my first Stranglers album ‘Rattus Norvegicus’ with its haunting final track Down in The Sewer. When I say album I’m giving away my age in this area where even cds have been replaced by instant downloads.
However I was saddened to hear that nine hundred thousand pounds will be spent, that’s nearly £1 million to you and me, on a project to wipe out black rats from the Hebridean Shiant Islands off the coast of Lewis. The rats are non-native to the islands and it is believed they came ashore from shipwrecks in the 1900s. So actually they have been on the islands for around one hundred years. Getting rid of the rats sounds a bit of a neutral term, actually what will happen is the rats will be poisoned and therefore suffer a pretty gruesome death.
As an animal welfare organisation OneKind believes that culling wild animals because their behaviour is inconvenient or causing a nuisance is a vastly disproportionate response and we would urge the project managers to consider non-lethal and humane management techniques as an alternative to the proposed cull.
It’s not as if we haven’t been here before. Last October it was reported that thousands of rabbits on the Island of Canna were to be culled. Why had they become a ‘problem’? Because in previous years six hundred thousand pounds had been spent getting rid of rats. As a result of killing rats, rabbit numbers increased and the proposed solution was more killing again, and spending yet more money in the process.
OneKind’s prime locus is the welfare of animals so we question whether it is right to inflict such pain and suffering on animals. But we also question the wisdom of the cycle of spending money, often public money, culling animals only to create further problems down the line with yet more culling proposed as a solution.
And lest anyone think of turning a blind eye to the culling because “it’s only rats”, as some may say, or because they are seen as ‘pests’ or ‘vermin’ you may be interested in a new study published this week. Researchers have found that rats are capable of feeling regret about their own actions, an emotion that has never previously been found in any other mammals apart from humans. The researchers set up tests so that they could monitor signs of regret and not just disappointment and found that rats exhibited behaviour that indicated regret. OneKind launched the ‘We’re not that Different’ campaign several years ago; the theme being that animals have sentience, the same as us humans. So we’re pleased that this study looks like being yet more proof of that.
The rats in Shiant cannot regret their actions as it was the actions of their ancestors many moons ago that took them to the Islands. But if a mass culling of rats today results in angst in future years by estate managers, then regret is perhaps also the wrong word. Lack of foresight, and not learning from other examples such as Canna is not regretful. Negligent would be a more appropriate word.