“Frankenstein was a scientist.
The monster was nameless.
It never existed, except as a metaphor for curiosity turned to hubris and then tragedy.
The future, with its sunscreen-smearing jets and its desperate attempts to cool the planet, is presumably imaginary –for now.”
– Kate Marvel, from “A Handful of Dust,” published in All We Can Save
I was reminded of this passage while reading a recent article about rat control in Bushnell Park.
I think the purpose of the article was to get the reader to applaud the efforts, which most noticeably involved dosing rats with birth control and then gassing them in their holes. No doubt there are those who find these methods humane, as they’re not being poisoned in a way that would impact hawks who might ingest the rodents.
What a messed up relationship we have with the natural world!
The photos above were taken of another kind of rodent at Charter Oak Landing and Riverside Park.
That creatures can live at all in an urban area that humans paved over, covered in concrete, polluted, and continue to largely disregard is not something we should be upset about.
And when it comes to the rats in Bushnell Park and elsewhere, we could have a little more respect.
In that article, a few words were spent on how replacing basic shrubs with native plantings have helped reduce rats congregating around Corning Fountain, but then nothing really in the way of critical thinking was offered to explain why rats were hanging out in other in certain areas.
There’s the thing we’re not supposed to talk about here: Bushnell Park — the park at the center of the city — does not receive the maintenance it deserves.
You can see this in the pond that is filled with litter; scooping it out once a year is not nearly enough.
You can see the neglect if you walk between the train station and Frog Hollow; along the train wall is trash that never gets picked up.
There are open dumpsters on this side of the park that are not cleaned often enough.
The area by the pavilion is mostly ignored, except when music season starts up.
There are remnants of abandoned camp sites — clothes and other garbage — on the far side of the park. These have been there for months, ignored by DPW or whomever is tasked with cleaning Bushnell Park.
There’s a question about why there aren’t enough trash barrels placed near where people gather, along with why portapotties are removed even though people use the park year-round. If people are deprived of an appropriate and private place to defecate, they’re going to end up going outside — and that has been the case several times in this park in the last year, and it’s left in the middle of the sidewalk.
Maybe instead of gassing rodents, we clean up our messes and make areas less attractive to them. Rats aren’t my favorite animal, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to kill them because it seems easier to do this than to maintain park spaces, empty dumpsters, and generally be better stewards of the land. Or, to put this another way, we may make the park rat-free by killing them, but it still looks like a damn rats’ nest when we don’t clean up the garbage.
