I finally really lost it today and started crying, and then sobbing, in my car leaving the gym. Maybe just a combo of holiday stress and my dog being sick, but the impetus was rodenticide use. While my landlords were in agreement with me that we’d have the pest control company use traps instead of poison, we learned last night that the guys had mistakenly placed poison all over the yard and crawl space instead of traps. My landlord sent them a strongly worded email. We waited. Today at the gym he texted me that the pest guys were basically like, we don’t really do traps, and all your neighbors are using poison anyway, so what’s the big deal? And my landlord is more inclined to go with them than with me; more inclined to have a rat-free living space than worry about nearby wildlife.
He’s got a point. Rats can cause a lot of damage.
AND. Rat poison is killing unprecedented numbers of birds of prey, bobcats, coyotes, even mountain lions. The rats eat the poison, run off somewhere and get eaten by a hawk or coyote, and then kill that animal as well. They kill outdoor cats, too. There’s also evidence that rat poison leaks into waterways and poisons our groundwater, too.
My landlord knows all this (because I’ve told him) but kinda feels like his hands are tied. He can’t have rats pooping in his house. The wildlife devastation “is unfortunate”.
So I cried, feeling the full weight of my education and the inability to change consumer demand through evidence or information. At the end of the day, consumers don’t care about facts; they care about convenience, and that is why we’re using plastic, using atrazine, driving everywhere, eating factory farmed animals, poisoning rats. We forget we’re in an ecosystem, not above it, and our choices have cascading effects.
It feels so timely to be reeling from the inability to influence consumer choices this time of year, as everyone around me scrambles to buy more. The traffic in Bend is insane this week. The holiday decor strewn down every store’s aisles, to be thrown away on Thursday, matches the plastic bullshit decorations all my neighbors are about to throw away too. Even I, seasoned Christmas hater, almost bought a few cheap elf hats as a joke for my loved ones to wear on Wednesday, as we open obligatory “gifts” we don’t need and consume more sugar and animal products than we actually want to.
I’m frustrated. I’m stoked to have loved ones to share holidays with, but I’m frustrated that I feel pressure to participate in the stressful capitalistic scam of Christmas. Obviously no one told me I had to buy or even make anyone anything, but if everyone’s making or buying something for me am I really supposed to just sit there and accept it? This is so awkward. I like a house free of rat shit but I am now complicit in poisoning the hawks that nest above the dog park a few blocks away, the bald eagles that nest at Smith Rock, the bobcats that adapt to us further encroaching on the desert they’ve inhabited for a thousand years. Not to mention…have you ever seen something die of poison? What a horrible way to kill someone.
So I cried. A lot of my degree is in education, or in how to disseminate information to the public in a way that actually alters consumer behavior, and the jist of what I’ve learned is that it’s really, really hard. People are more likely to hold onto their beliefs when confronted with facts against those beliefs than they are to change behavior. People would rather ignore a crisis than change their spending habits, or their eating habits, or their voting habits. We were told Israel is full of god’s people so we don’t question their snipers targeting little kids and grandmas. We were told meat is necessary (and so tasty!) so we don’t watch the leaked videos from “farms” and slaughterhouses. We were told rat poison is the most effective way to keep your home free of rodents so we ignore the owls writhing in agony at the nearby wildlife rescue. We have more evidence today of the cancer-causing effects of atrazine than we had for DDT when it was pulled from the market, but we don’t ban atrazine. You know why? Because it is effective. Plus, it’s mainly poor people in farming towns immediately impacted by the poison, so who cares. The Palestinians are brown. I don’t even know any owls.
I’m frustrated. I feel helpless. I can barely convince my roommates to compost their coffee grinds, let alone move environmental health behaviors into common practice. Even my most eco-aware friends support, financially, factory farming. My most woo woo spiritual friends ignore politics and therefore science in favor of comfort and prettiness. We all drive cars.
I don’t know what to do with my degree. I don’t know how you change a mind, or how you change consumer practices. I don’t know how many more “then why are they made of bacon tho” stupid comments I can handle before I truly snap. I don’t know why I’m even linking all this information in here knowing that facts don’t change behavior or beliefs.
If you’re reading this…I don’t know. I just hope you don’t use rat poison.