What is
your relationship to animals (such as pigeons) in the city? What should their relationship to humans
be? Do they make city life more
interesting for its human residents, or do they belong in the countryside and
are only a nuisance in urban areas?
A person usually feels disgusted when animals are seen in a park or somewhere in the city. Let's take medická garden for example. Imagine you are strolling around the park and suddenly a racoon pops out of nowhere jumping in the trash can, taking out anything resembling food. You instantly say “disgusting, why is it here?”. However does a person think more thoroughly before making an assumption that it’s “not supposed” to be there? The article mentions that we “mostly view them as pests: pigeons, raccoons, and rats.”. I presume that this is a fact for most people in the city. However if we take a look at the problem from a different perspective we will clearly see it isn’t just what you see on the surface.
ReplyDeleteAnimals living in parks and even sometimes around the whole city need shelter, need an environment to live in, we cannot expect the animals to just stay in the woods all the time because humans can’t just dictate how nature should be, because the name says it all; nature is natural, meaning it’s natural to itself, you can’t change natures nature because you don’t like it.
Habitat is key to any living organism. Human habitat is usually the city, their house, the environment where they feel comfortable in. If this is pleasant to humans then why would this rule not apply to animals? Racoons, pigeons, they all need to live somewhere and when they stumble across a park they will be inclined to be there. Once they get accustomed to the place, they tend to stay there and viola you have an ecological system inside a park. Garbage cans provide food, trees provide shelter, lakes(or fountains) provide water; it’s everything they need.
The question is whether or not we should take preventive measures against the formation of “natural environments”, however one thing stays and that is – animals are an integrated part of the world where cities, parks and gardens are of no exception.
It is improbable, that the part of the people who see animals like mice, rats and racoons to be anything else than just pests will be larger than the part of the people who see them just disgusting, useless and harmful.
ReplyDeleteThe first reason is very easy to understand. Even though they belong to the world around us and have the same rights as us to live wherever they want to live, they will always be our enemy and rivals in the fight for food. Their low consumption of food is not something that we should be worried about, but they also need to eat at least a little bit and when there is not much to get in the woods, fields or in the city parks (especially as the winter comes), they come closer to human-inhabited areas. From my personal experience, it’s not something what I see with pleasure, when I find for example the packages of flour or chocolate half eaten by a rat or a mouse.
Not only they eat and spoil food stored by humans, but they carry diseases with them which can easily spread and that is a really huge problem with these animals. There have been plenty of well-known cases when serious diseases were transmitted through birds or more often through rodents such as rats and house mice. It can be either through their fur and feathers or through their body fluids.
The last but not least of the problems lie in the meaning of the word "pest" itself. We wouldn’t call them pests if they lived only in forests, far away from humans, where they can’t cause harm, or if they were just nice, harmless inhabitants of the city, not negatively influencing our lives. But while they live with us and they cause many problems, there is not any other possibility than just call them pests.
All things considered, despite that the authors of the article tried to show us the other side of those synanthropes, providing my arguments, I’m not convinced by the article to think of them as anything else than just pests and I am not one of those people, who would care about what they toss in the trash just because it can be another animal’s meal. It made me wonder how to make cities more waste-free, so we wouldn’t support the infestation of those animals. They are living organisms and we are taught that we should treat all the living organisms with respect, but this isn’t about that. This is about the fact that they can be very harmful to us, so the less of them are in the cities, the better it is.
Written by Rio
DeleteThere is one quote said by Jonas Salk, an American virologist. “If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within fifty years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within fifty years all forms of life would flourish.” We humans are incapable of living without nature, we all know this, but at the same time, we are egocentric against them.
What Kornelia mentioned in the comment is all facts, they do bring diseases and they do defile our environment, although we need to remember that humans are the ones who started all this. For example we can see Tokyo, one of the most developed cities in the world. In recent years the number of wild animals such as raccoons and wild cats coming from the mountains are increasing. This movement is not a natural phenomenon, but it is caused by environmental destruction and irresponsible feeding committed by humans. Abandoning forests, expanding lands, and pollution destroys habitats for wildlife, and at the same time those animals gets attracted to irresponsible trash humans leave behind.
People often unilaterally blame the animals for this issue, however we must understand that we are the victim and we are the cause, and in my opinion blaming only the animals is a self-centered and irresponsible act.
Just as Tomáš claims, people usually feel disgusted when they see an animal in a park or in the city. But wasn’t bringing the pastoral into cities the main purpose of building these parks? Of course they were designed to serve as leisure facilities, rather than “refuge for wildlife”. However, especially in New York, where Central Park is (by land area) bigger than Monaco, somewhat diverse wildlife must have been expected to became an inseparable part of it. It is simply natural. Moreover, since most of these animals are nocturnal, the probability of being bothered by one in the daytime is very small. To me, all these animals complete the atmosphere of a genuine park contrasting the concrete jungle of the rest of the city.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, if we do consider these synanthropes as pests, it is up to us to react. Maybe from audio tours such as about raccoons, we, as the lay public, could interactively gather information about their actual lifestyle and make direct changes in our own lifestyle. For example, how to prevent the city parks from being such a big attraction to these synanthropic animals. Maybe, as the article suggests, thinking twice about what we toss in the trash could be a solid starting point. Maybe making it harder for these animals to find food in the trash (either by not tossing it there or making it physically impossible for them to reach) would result in reduced numbers of them. Maybe we could find various natural ways of making the city parks enough unfavourable habitat for them, so that they would gradually leave. And maybe, maybe, more people would stop writing them off as a nuisance.