Prevention or Poisoning? Dilemmas in Urban Rat Control

Authors

  • Gabriela Jarzebowska University of Warsaw, Poland

Abstract

Is it possible to solve the urban rat problem once and for all? Most scientists agree that eradicating rat populations completely is an impossible task, but at the same time emphasize that we already have a solution that can significantly reduce them. It is not a new, “miracle” rodenticide that they refer to. In fact, effective strategies for rat control, based on ecology, were invented in Baltimore in the 1940s. So why do we still struggle with this problem?

Author Biography

Gabriela Jarzebowska, University of Warsaw, Poland

Gabriela Jarzebowska is a PhD candidate at the Artes Liberales Faculty, University of Warsaw, Poland. She also collaborates with the Seedbox Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, Linköping University, Sweden. She deals with the environmental humanities and critical animal studies, which focus on urban multispecies politics, more-than-human axiology, and pest control ethics. During the last few years, she has also been an activist and a leader of grassroots Bios Amigos foundation whose goal was to promote non-anthropocentric, ecological thinking through workshops, seminars, and social campaigns. In her work, she aims at developing theory-to-practice approaches and making alliances between scholarly, artistic, and activist groups, both theorists and practitioners.

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Published

2017-08-26

Issue

2017

Section

Summer

License

Copyright (c) 2017 CC BY 4.0 Gabriela Jarzebowska

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.