The Ecological Origins and Consequences of the Rodent Bait Station: From WWII Britain to Contemporary California

ABSTRACT

This article describes the origin of the rodent bait station, a globally distributed system for controlling rats, currently creating a secondary ecological crisis affecting wildlife who eat rats that have eaten the poison. I argue that this system is tied to settler colonial places like California and that banning poison will not address the crisis. It details the history of this box as a scientific ecological solution to rat control, created by Charles Elton and his research group during WWII. I pair this account with an account of contemporary science into the ecological crisis of rodenticides.

KEYWORDS:

• California
• ecology
• rodenticides
• settler colonialism
• traps

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Oliver French, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, Frédéric Keck, Christos Lynteris for providing a venue for this work and careful readings of it, and to Lisa Onaga, Ignacio Farias, Hannah Landecker for comments and discussion. Thanks also to Dr. Niamh Quinn for a warm welcome to the Rodent Academy, and to all the pest control technicians who helped me understand what they do. Research conducted under UCLA IRB#17-000297.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Fieldnotes, “West Coast Rodent Academy,” Nov 2019.

2. My fieldwork consisted of two years of participant-observation through ride-alongs, attendance at company meetings, interviews with employees and firm managers, attendance at pest control trade shows and conferences, discussions with residents who employ pest control, and occasional serendipitous encounters with pest control professionals in the city. All the work took place in Los Angeles, with the exception of conferences and trade shows elsewhere in California.

3. Choy (2011) distinguishes three senses of the term ecology: 1) the general meaning of “environmental,” 2) the science of ecology in the twentieth century, and 3) the analytic of mutually interacting relations (“ecosystem”).

4. In this and the following two sections, page numbers refer to this text, unless otherwise cited.

Additional information

Funding

The UCLA Grand Challenges Sustainable LA program and the Institute for Society and Genetics funded this research. The Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science provided support for writing and presenting this work.

Notes on contributors

Christopher M. Kelty

Christopher M. Kelty is a professor at UCLA.