The problem is that there are quite a few X who adapt rapidly to new environments and also like the same kinds of environments as humans, and so creating human-friendly X-unfriendly environments becomes increasingly challenging as X adapts more and more to only require what humans require from an environment.
Re:DC’s war on rats goes digital
by maoistinquisitr on Monday January 01, 2018 @09:21PM
(#16049384)
A traditional and effective measure against urban rat populations is stray cats. But for whatever reason people in the west won't allow that anymore.
One of the related stories on the site talks about using feral cats: https://wamu.org/story/17/07/07/feral-cats-solve-d-c-s-rat-p...
There is a program to place feral cats with residents who request them and it has a waiting list. Its effectiveness is debated, and bird advocates don't like it.
Because they are indiscriminate. They are not programmed to attack just rats, they will decimate all small animal populations and fight with pets. We could let that happen but that comes back around to having an increasingly human unfriendly environment to deal with the rats
I've seen rats in DC that would eat a cat for breakfast. Those suckers are huge!
So you need coyotes instead?
They can likely deal with any size rat.
Or rat terriers, controlling rats since 1545 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Terrier
If you have large numbers of X, it's because you're creating a very favorable habitat for it. If you don't address that issue and just keep killing them, you'll have both large numbers of X and large numbers of X corpses.
There are also arguably ethical issues with killing huge numbers of intelligent, social animals simply because we don't like their presence.