Post by Christine on Jun 6, 2008 4:12:27 GMT -5
Peter Rabbit Must Die
By JOYCE WADLER
THE homeowner, a city-boy artist and illustrator who had moved to rural Pennsylvania, never wanted to kill the woodchucks. Sure, they were ruining the garden and digging up the foundations of outbuildings, but it was a moral issue: the artist, who is still so uncomfortable about what transpired — and so concerned about how his New York clients would feel about it that he is not willing to be identified — did not want to take a life.
Given the size of the property — a 12-acre former horse farm — fencing was out of the question. He bought a Havahart live animal trap but did not catch a thing. And he worried that releasing woodchucks down the road would only be dumping the problem on a neighbor. So he moved on to that tried-and-true landlord’s tactic: harassment. He attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his old pickup truck and stuffed it into a burrow — not to kill the woodchucks, just to encourage them to move on. That didn’t work, either.
Finally, the artist decided he would have to shoot the animals. First, though, he went to each hole and made an announcement.
“I said: ‘I intend to kill you. You have 24 hours to get out,’ ” he recalls. “I wanted to give them fair warning. I said, ‘If I were you, I would find another place to live.’ I also promised them I would not take a shot unless I knew it would be fatal.”
He is making this into a funny story, he says, but when he killed his first woodchuck he “literally felt sick.”
“I went outside and knelt down to it and said a little prayer to whatever the powers that be that when my turn comes, I will do it as gracefully and uncomplainingly.”
Eventually, though, he embraced his mission, and grew so obsessed with it that an aunt began to call him Woodchuck Johnny. How many did he kill that summer?
“I stopped at 19,” he says. “One was a suicide. It realized its days were numbered and ran in front of a car.”
The artist’s story is not as unusual as some would like to believe. As summer closes in, gardeners around the country are starting to worry about the animals that may end up enjoying their roses and cucumbers more than they do. Any day now, they know, they may come upon a carrot patch ravaged by groundhogs, lettuce ransacked by rabbits and squirrels, or a massacre in the koi pond.
But for many gardeners — the tenderhearted ones, who pride themselves on their decency and compassion — killing pests, particularly those with big eyes, fluffy tails and cousins who work for Disney, could never be a solution of first resort.
“People who garden have an obvious love of life, a reverence for life, and to kill something in order to garden is very rough,” says Liz Krieg, who runs the Rising Sun Greenhouses and Landscape Company in Bethel, Vt., and who dispatches only the scarlet lily beetle.
City people tend to take up gardening in their yards or at their summer houses with a generous attitude toward summer’s bounty, ready to live and let live. The woodchucks want a few zucchini? No problem, there are enough to go around. The rabbits are decimating the lettuce? Get a humane trap and move them elsewhere.
Soon enough, though, they realize it’s not that simple. The animals do not take one or two tomatoes as if they’re in a greenmarket in the Hamptons; they go down the row sampling, so that everything is ruined. Or they uproot and destroy a crop, without eating a thing, in their search for insects and grubs. There is, in fact, a sameness to the stories the gardeners tell: “If they just had taken one head of lettuce, or a few strawberries — but they decimated the whole thing!” After a season of grueling labor and multiple attempts at benign deterrence, the sight of a trashed garden is often the last straw: the moment when a gentle gardener will suddenly go Rambo.
Such was the case with Susanne Williams, a retired supply officer for the Alaska Department of Transportation, who lives with her husband in Douglas, near Juneau. Gardening is a struggle in southeast Alaska, she says; there is not a lot of sun. But she and her husband have two gardens, one at their home overlooking the Gastineau Channel, the other at the local community garden near the Mendenhall Glacier. They give much of their produce to charity and put up mesh at home in an unsuccessful attempt to keep out porcupines.
Five years ago there were serious animal problems at the community garden — black bear, deer, beaver — but “the worst pest of all was the porcupine,” Ms. Williams says. “The kindhearted would trap them and drive them 10 or 15 miles away, until one of the forest people said they just came back.”
It reached a point, Ms. Williams says, when gardeners were so frustrated that at least 30 of the 150 plots were empty.
“So finally, four years ago, we put an electric fence all around this big field, but the porcupines then decide to burrow under the fence,” she says. “They’re ingenious. So we had to put rocks down and pour cement.”
Even then, a porcupine managed to get in. And when she saw it, “strolling along, munching away,” she could stand no more.
“He was after my carrot crop,” she explains. “I said, I just cannot handle this anymore. He sees me and tries to wander off, but they can’t run very fast. I got him with the sledgehammer. He tried to dodge me, but I got him on the head.”
And no, she hasn’t lost any sleep over it.
“It was sad, but I am tired of being the fancy kitchen for critters,” she says. She has a friend in the area who has “just given up” on being kind to the animals: “He goes after them with a pitchfork and puts them in his compost pile. I don’t think the PETA people would like him much.”
She adds: “Doesn’t the spinach scream when it boils? I think probably all living things have some scream going on. We’re all predators, no matter whether we’re animals, mineral, birds or fish, and that’s part of it.”
Taking pest control into your own hands, of course, is no simple matter. There are the ethical and emotional issues, and while it is often legal to kill a pest, there are innumerable federal, state and municipal laws and regulations that may make it illegal.
There would seem, at first, to be many alternatives to killing. Besides mesh and electric fences, there are nets to cast over trees and gardens; foul scents with names like Not Tonight, Deer; and home remedies like sprinkling cayenne pepper around the tomatoes and dumping used cat litter into woodchuck holes. There are scarecrows in the north and fake alligators in the south, and household pets to scare predators away or to do the gardeners’ dirty work. There are capture-and-release traps.
But none of these methods work all the time, and some, depending on the species you are trying to catch and the area in which you live, may not even be legal. The New York State Environmental Protection Law, for example, forbids anyone but a state Nuisance Wildlife Control Operator from transporting a wild animal, which puts the kibosh on the use of capture-and-release traps.
Trapping and moving animals may not be in their best interests, either: a backyard suburban squirrel, transported to a forest, is easy prey for hawks and foxes, said John Hadidian, the director of urban wildlife programs for the Humane Society of the United States and the primary author of “Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife.” (The book suggests tolerance as its first choice for everything from bats to rats.)
And releasing an animal in a more familiar setting may not be in your neighbors’ best interests.
“We have yet to find anyone in outlying areas who says, ‘We love raccoons, please bring your humanely trapped critters here and let them go,’ ” says Wendell Martin, a retired engineer who has a five-acre garden in Meridian, Idaho, near Boise. Raccoons have uprooted and upended his water lilies to find snails. Mr. Martin finally borrowed a .22 and shot them. It was not an ethical problem for him, he says — the animals are overpopulated in his area — but it was not easy emotionally. (This year there seem to be fewer of them, and he has been trying to protect his plants with wire mesh.)
Then there are the difficulties that can arise when transporting a wild animal.
Jessica DuLong, a Brooklyn writer and marine engineer, managed to grow a fruit-bearing cherry tree on her roof, but even in the wake of what she calls the Great Cherry Massacre of 2007 she was not interested in punishing the squirrels who preyed on it. She trapped one in a live animal trap and set out to Prospect Park with good intentions.
Unfortunately, the squirrel had no way of knowing this. It threw itself against the walls of the cage with such ferocity it cut itself; it defecated; it ran back and forth inside the long cage in a frenzy so that the cage flipped up and down like a manic miniature seesaw. New Yorkers, seeing a fluffy tail in distress, yelled at the human involved.
“This entire class of preschool kids was out in one of their little preschool wagons, and the squirrel is looking rabid and bleeding at the mouth,” she says. “It was not what I had in mind when I started this humanitarian project.”
Not all city people, of course are so sweetly disposed to cute rodents. Joanna Lennig is an executive headhunter who lives in Brooklyn but grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. As a 10-year-old she was stunned to see her mother, “an incredibly polite, retiring, WASP lady,” attacking a woodchuck in the vegetable garden with a shovel.
“You know that body posture someone has when they’re using a pickax,” Ms. Lennig says. “She was just enraged. We just talked about this recently — being WASPs, we’d never talked about it. We were a family who canned the corn and canned the beans and really put food aside for the winter, so having an animal go through the green beans, she was furious. She said she’d had it.”
Ms. Lennig herself has no sentimental attachment to squirrels. About three years ago she saw signs of digging in the rooftop garden of her brownstone, which has pots of blueberry bushes, grape vines, tomatoes and peppers, as well as flowering plants, and is a regular stop on garden tours. She was unconcerned by this evidence of squirrel interlopers until the day she went up to find the garden destroyed, the blueberry bush razed, the tomato plants eaten through.
“There was a wow factor,” Ms. Lennig says. “Like when one looks out at the aftermath of a really, really, really destructive thunderstorm and says, ‘Look at that tree branch on the Volvo.’ ” Ms. Lennig went “straight to rage.” She and her husband bought a Havahart trap and captured a squirrel, then realized they did not have a plan. Transporting it to a nearby park didn’t seem an effective solution. Squirrels, they had heard, were territorial; it would only come back.
They did, however, as conscientious environmentalists, have a large rain barrel on the roof, which they used to water the garden. Who first came up with the idea of drowning, Ms. Lennig cannot recall, but it was her husband who handled the first executions. The trap, which was long and narrow, fit perfectly in the barrel.
Ms. Lennig has yet to be able to deal with the removal of the corpse, which is then thrown into the garbage. But she and her husband are now so comfortable with this form of pest control that when they visited Ms. Lennig’s in-laws at their lakefront property last year, where squirrels were climbing on the deck and ravaging the planters, they offered to drown them.
“My husband and I said, ‘We’ll take them to the lake,’ ” she says, “but our in-laws were having none of that. We had to get in the car and drive them five miles away. I spent the entire weekend like a soccer mom, driving squirrels around.”
Isn’t drowning cruel?
No, Ms. Lennig says. She recalls reading that you lose consciousness and then your heart stops; it’s actually one of the nicer ways to go.
A reporter remembers reading just the opposite (and the Humane Society agrees that drowning is inhumane).
“Listen,” Ms. Lennig says. “I’m a former attorney. What do I know?”
Few who have made the leap from pacifism to search-and-destroy missions are this open on the subject. Who, after all, wants to risk being labeled a hardened animal killer? There are, however, those willing to take the heat. Boldest are those who admit to killing garden pests simply because they are annoying.
Dan Rattiner is the founder of Dan’s Papers and the author of “In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years With Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities.” He has a house in East Hampton, and for the last three years he has hired exterminators to get rid of the carpenter bees, which, he is well aware, do not sting.
So what do they do?
“They sort of follow you around,” Mr. Rattiner says. “They’re curious, like Curious George bees.”
That sounds sort of sweet.
No, Mr. Rattiner says.
“You can’t sit outside — the carpenter bees come over to see what you’re eating,” he says. “They don’t land on you, it’s not like menacing, it’s like having small children that aren’t yours. You just want them gone. There’s no other way to do it, and I feel very badly about it. I don’t know why they keep coming back. You’d think they’d talk to each other about what happened last year.”
Many gardeners are able to kill only one species.
“If I see a spider, I would never kill it,” says Jessica Melville, a nurse in Woodstock, Vt. “We have woodchucks in the yard; they don’t bother me at all.”
But Ms. Melville, who lives with her husband, Hunter, and two sons, is terrified of snakes. Unfortunately, her home, an 1850 farmhouse, is built into a stone wall that the local milk snakes and garter snakes love. Ms. Melville’s husband, who co-founded cyberrentals.com, explained to her that those snakes are harmful only to the insects they catch, but no matter. Before kneeling down in the perennial bed, Ms. Melville used to do what her family called her snake dance, jumping up and down, because when those snakes heard the pounding, they slithered away. If she happened to see a snake, she’d retreat into the house, and that would be it for that day’s gardening.
The Melvilles tried a granulated repellent called Snake Away. It didn’t work, so Mr. Melville, who occasionally hunts birds, bought his wife a 20-gauge shotgun. Although some might think a snake would be a difficult target, it is not. Often, when a predator is near, a snake will freeze.
“I just went up really close,” Ms. Melville says. “I was probably five feet from it. The first shot I missed. The second time I got it and then it was: ‘Oh, this is great! One less snake I have to deal with.’ ”
Ms. Melville has been shooting snakes for the last three years and estimates that she has killed about 15. But she’s killing snakes that are eating bugs? Doesn’t that distress her?
“No,” Ms. Melville says. “I’m just a happier gardener.”
Second thoughts? Regrets? Nightmares?
“Nope, never,” Ms. Melville says. “I’m just glad they’re gone.”
Regrets are even rarer among those whose livelihoods are threatened by pests.
Oskian Yaziciyan lives in Homestead, Fla., about a 20-minute drive north of Key Largo, where he runs Goldfish & Koi U.S.A., a two-and-a-half-acre ornamental fish and water lily farm. He has great feelings of affection for some of the animals other people detest. He had a pet squirrel as a boy and loves to watch squirrels. He finds them charming.
On the other hand, when he first began his business 12 years ago, and an equally adorable raccoon figured out how to depress a pipe to let the water out of a tank and ate about $6,000 worth of koi, it did not end well.
So what did Mr. Yaziciyan do?
“I’m not going to tell you,” Mr. Yaziciyan said. “I told my wife I took it to the Everglades.”
Mr. Yaziciyan has since made a practice of covering the ponds with shade cloth, netting or wire. It is not an aesthetic solution. And it doesn’t always get rid of his biggest problem: birds. Herons, which are a protected species, are a problem, as are crows, Mr. Yaziciyan wrote in an e-mail message, because they eat the eyes out of fish and snatch surface swimmers. Heron, with their rapierlike beaks, are adept killing machines.
“Koi are very expensive fish — you have a 14- or 15-inch koi, depending on the grade, it could be $50 or $2,000,” says Mr. Yaziciyan, whose own stock ranges from a more modest $5 to $500. “They go for the larger fish, your prize fish. They even kill fish they are unable to swallow. They pull it out of the water, eat its guts out.”
This eating-the-eyes-out part is casting a new light on the bucolic animal kingdom, Mr. Yaziciyan is told.
“I got a lot of blind fish,” Mr. Yaziciyan says.
Mr. Yaziciyan says he does not touch the heron. But he has gone after ravens, blue birds and crows with a net, banging their heads against a concrete or wood surface. It’s a quick death.
One visualizes a chirping cartoon bird, advising Snow White on an available share in the woods. We’re talking the bluebird of happiness, Mr. Yaziciyan. Isn’t it difficult to slam it against the concrete?
“Not really,” Mr. Yaziciyan says. “It’s a small bird. It may be a blue jay, maybe a blue bird with gray on it. I’ve seen them poke the eyes out of the fish. You gotta do what you gotta do. You got a $50 fish that is totally useless. No one will buy a fish with one eye. I got dozens of fish with one eye.”
The food chain is a brutal business. Or a natural one. Which brings us back to the artist with the groundhog problem. He was finally able to make a little bit of peace with shooting the woodchucks on his property by cooking and eating them. “It was a way of taking full responsibility for taking a life,” he says. “Almost like a spiritual journey.”
“Any number of local people offered up recipes,” the artist adds. “The guy who was doing some roofing work was Italian, and he described this wonderful recipe: essentially shallots, red wine, cured green olives, black pepper and rosemary. My father-in-law had a big helping. He declared it the best woodchuck he’d ever eaten.”
There Are Other Ways
JOHN HADIDIAN, the director of urban wildlife programs for the Humane Society of the United States, is skeptical when he hears of gardeners who claim they have tried everything to rid themselves of urban pests. He also cautions that gardeners who kill animals and birds may be breaking the law, noting that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, for example, protects most species of birds.
Killing animals often does not solve the problem. “Woodchucks are a classic case,” Mr. Hadidian says. “If you do nothing to alter the burrow system or to protect against reinvasion, it’s going to be back.”
Mr. Hadidian is the primary author of “Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife,” which offers information about wild animals as well as creative and humane methods of discouraging them from eating your plants. To protect corn from raccoons, who tend to go for it when it ripens, the book suggests leaving a radio “tuned to an all-night talk show” out in the garden on the nights just before harvest. Or one might try the more prosaic electrical fence.
For help, Mr. Hadidian suggests calling the society’s wildlife hotline, (203) 389-4411, which is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Eastern time. (It has a staff of two.)
There is also the approach offered by Catherine Wachs, a gardener who runs the Right Brain Design advertising company and lives in Larchmont, N.Y.: “I do what the Bible says: Leave the corners of your field unharvested for the poor and strangers among you.”
By JOYCE WADLER
THE homeowner, a city-boy artist and illustrator who had moved to rural Pennsylvania, never wanted to kill the woodchucks. Sure, they were ruining the garden and digging up the foundations of outbuildings, but it was a moral issue: the artist, who is still so uncomfortable about what transpired — and so concerned about how his New York clients would feel about it that he is not willing to be identified — did not want to take a life.
Given the size of the property — a 12-acre former horse farm — fencing was out of the question. He bought a Havahart live animal trap but did not catch a thing. And he worried that releasing woodchucks down the road would only be dumping the problem on a neighbor. So he moved on to that tried-and-true landlord’s tactic: harassment. He attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his old pickup truck and stuffed it into a burrow — not to kill the woodchucks, just to encourage them to move on. That didn’t work, either.
Finally, the artist decided he would have to shoot the animals. First, though, he went to each hole and made an announcement.
“I said: ‘I intend to kill you. You have 24 hours to get out,’ ” he recalls. “I wanted to give them fair warning. I said, ‘If I were you, I would find another place to live.’ I also promised them I would not take a shot unless I knew it would be fatal.”
He is making this into a funny story, he says, but when he killed his first woodchuck he “literally felt sick.”
“I went outside and knelt down to it and said a little prayer to whatever the powers that be that when my turn comes, I will do it as gracefully and uncomplainingly.”
Eventually, though, he embraced his mission, and grew so obsessed with it that an aunt began to call him Woodchuck Johnny. How many did he kill that summer?
“I stopped at 19,” he says. “One was a suicide. It realized its days were numbered and ran in front of a car.”
The artist’s story is not as unusual as some would like to believe. As summer closes in, gardeners around the country are starting to worry about the animals that may end up enjoying their roses and cucumbers more than they do. Any day now, they know, they may come upon a carrot patch ravaged by groundhogs, lettuce ransacked by rabbits and squirrels, or a massacre in the koi pond.
But for many gardeners — the tenderhearted ones, who pride themselves on their decency and compassion — killing pests, particularly those with big eyes, fluffy tails and cousins who work for Disney, could never be a solution of first resort.
“People who garden have an obvious love of life, a reverence for life, and to kill something in order to garden is very rough,” says Liz Krieg, who runs the Rising Sun Greenhouses and Landscape Company in Bethel, Vt., and who dispatches only the scarlet lily beetle.
City people tend to take up gardening in their yards or at their summer houses with a generous attitude toward summer’s bounty, ready to live and let live. The woodchucks want a few zucchini? No problem, there are enough to go around. The rabbits are decimating the lettuce? Get a humane trap and move them elsewhere.
Soon enough, though, they realize it’s not that simple. The animals do not take one or two tomatoes as if they’re in a greenmarket in the Hamptons; they go down the row sampling, so that everything is ruined. Or they uproot and destroy a crop, without eating a thing, in their search for insects and grubs. There is, in fact, a sameness to the stories the gardeners tell: “If they just had taken one head of lettuce, or a few strawberries — but they decimated the whole thing!” After a season of grueling labor and multiple attempts at benign deterrence, the sight of a trashed garden is often the last straw: the moment when a gentle gardener will suddenly go Rambo.
Such was the case with Susanne Williams, a retired supply officer for the Alaska Department of Transportation, who lives with her husband in Douglas, near Juneau. Gardening is a struggle in southeast Alaska, she says; there is not a lot of sun. But she and her husband have two gardens, one at their home overlooking the Gastineau Channel, the other at the local community garden near the Mendenhall Glacier. They give much of their produce to charity and put up mesh at home in an unsuccessful attempt to keep out porcupines.
Five years ago there were serious animal problems at the community garden — black bear, deer, beaver — but “the worst pest of all was the porcupine,” Ms. Williams says. “The kindhearted would trap them and drive them 10 or 15 miles away, until one of the forest people said they just came back.”
It reached a point, Ms. Williams says, when gardeners were so frustrated that at least 30 of the 150 plots were empty.
“So finally, four years ago, we put an electric fence all around this big field, but the porcupines then decide to burrow under the fence,” she says. “They’re ingenious. So we had to put rocks down and pour cement.”
Even then, a porcupine managed to get in. And when she saw it, “strolling along, munching away,” she could stand no more.
“He was after my carrot crop,” she explains. “I said, I just cannot handle this anymore. He sees me and tries to wander off, but they can’t run very fast. I got him with the sledgehammer. He tried to dodge me, but I got him on the head.”
And no, she hasn’t lost any sleep over it.
“It was sad, but I am tired of being the fancy kitchen for critters,” she says. She has a friend in the area who has “just given up” on being kind to the animals: “He goes after them with a pitchfork and puts them in his compost pile. I don’t think the PETA people would like him much.”
She adds: “Doesn’t the spinach scream when it boils? I think probably all living things have some scream going on. We’re all predators, no matter whether we’re animals, mineral, birds or fish, and that’s part of it.”
Taking pest control into your own hands, of course, is no simple matter. There are the ethical and emotional issues, and while it is often legal to kill a pest, there are innumerable federal, state and municipal laws and regulations that may make it illegal.
There would seem, at first, to be many alternatives to killing. Besides mesh and electric fences, there are nets to cast over trees and gardens; foul scents with names like Not Tonight, Deer; and home remedies like sprinkling cayenne pepper around the tomatoes and dumping used cat litter into woodchuck holes. There are scarecrows in the north and fake alligators in the south, and household pets to scare predators away or to do the gardeners’ dirty work. There are capture-and-release traps.
But none of these methods work all the time, and some, depending on the species you are trying to catch and the area in which you live, may not even be legal. The New York State Environmental Protection Law, for example, forbids anyone but a state Nuisance Wildlife Control Operator from transporting a wild animal, which puts the kibosh on the use of capture-and-release traps.
Trapping and moving animals may not be in their best interests, either: a backyard suburban squirrel, transported to a forest, is easy prey for hawks and foxes, said John Hadidian, the director of urban wildlife programs for the Humane Society of the United States and the primary author of “Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife.” (The book suggests tolerance as its first choice for everything from bats to rats.)
And releasing an animal in a more familiar setting may not be in your neighbors’ best interests.
“We have yet to find anyone in outlying areas who says, ‘We love raccoons, please bring your humanely trapped critters here and let them go,’ ” says Wendell Martin, a retired engineer who has a five-acre garden in Meridian, Idaho, near Boise. Raccoons have uprooted and upended his water lilies to find snails. Mr. Martin finally borrowed a .22 and shot them. It was not an ethical problem for him, he says — the animals are overpopulated in his area — but it was not easy emotionally. (This year there seem to be fewer of them, and he has been trying to protect his plants with wire mesh.)
Then there are the difficulties that can arise when transporting a wild animal.
Jessica DuLong, a Brooklyn writer and marine engineer, managed to grow a fruit-bearing cherry tree on her roof, but even in the wake of what she calls the Great Cherry Massacre of 2007 she was not interested in punishing the squirrels who preyed on it. She trapped one in a live animal trap and set out to Prospect Park with good intentions.
Unfortunately, the squirrel had no way of knowing this. It threw itself against the walls of the cage with such ferocity it cut itself; it defecated; it ran back and forth inside the long cage in a frenzy so that the cage flipped up and down like a manic miniature seesaw. New Yorkers, seeing a fluffy tail in distress, yelled at the human involved.
“This entire class of preschool kids was out in one of their little preschool wagons, and the squirrel is looking rabid and bleeding at the mouth,” she says. “It was not what I had in mind when I started this humanitarian project.”
Not all city people, of course are so sweetly disposed to cute rodents. Joanna Lennig is an executive headhunter who lives in Brooklyn but grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. As a 10-year-old she was stunned to see her mother, “an incredibly polite, retiring, WASP lady,” attacking a woodchuck in the vegetable garden with a shovel.
“You know that body posture someone has when they’re using a pickax,” Ms. Lennig says. “She was just enraged. We just talked about this recently — being WASPs, we’d never talked about it. We were a family who canned the corn and canned the beans and really put food aside for the winter, so having an animal go through the green beans, she was furious. She said she’d had it.”
Ms. Lennig herself has no sentimental attachment to squirrels. About three years ago she saw signs of digging in the rooftop garden of her brownstone, which has pots of blueberry bushes, grape vines, tomatoes and peppers, as well as flowering plants, and is a regular stop on garden tours. She was unconcerned by this evidence of squirrel interlopers until the day she went up to find the garden destroyed, the blueberry bush razed, the tomato plants eaten through.
“There was a wow factor,” Ms. Lennig says. “Like when one looks out at the aftermath of a really, really, really destructive thunderstorm and says, ‘Look at that tree branch on the Volvo.’ ” Ms. Lennig went “straight to rage.” She and her husband bought a Havahart trap and captured a squirrel, then realized they did not have a plan. Transporting it to a nearby park didn’t seem an effective solution. Squirrels, they had heard, were territorial; it would only come back.
They did, however, as conscientious environmentalists, have a large rain barrel on the roof, which they used to water the garden. Who first came up with the idea of drowning, Ms. Lennig cannot recall, but it was her husband who handled the first executions. The trap, which was long and narrow, fit perfectly in the barrel.
Ms. Lennig has yet to be able to deal with the removal of the corpse, which is then thrown into the garbage. But she and her husband are now so comfortable with this form of pest control that when they visited Ms. Lennig’s in-laws at their lakefront property last year, where squirrels were climbing on the deck and ravaging the planters, they offered to drown them.
“My husband and I said, ‘We’ll take them to the lake,’ ” she says, “but our in-laws were having none of that. We had to get in the car and drive them five miles away. I spent the entire weekend like a soccer mom, driving squirrels around.”
Isn’t drowning cruel?
No, Ms. Lennig says. She recalls reading that you lose consciousness and then your heart stops; it’s actually one of the nicer ways to go.
A reporter remembers reading just the opposite (and the Humane Society agrees that drowning is inhumane).
“Listen,” Ms. Lennig says. “I’m a former attorney. What do I know?”
Few who have made the leap from pacifism to search-and-destroy missions are this open on the subject. Who, after all, wants to risk being labeled a hardened animal killer? There are, however, those willing to take the heat. Boldest are those who admit to killing garden pests simply because they are annoying.
Dan Rattiner is the founder of Dan’s Papers and the author of “In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years With Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities.” He has a house in East Hampton, and for the last three years he has hired exterminators to get rid of the carpenter bees, which, he is well aware, do not sting.
So what do they do?
“They sort of follow you around,” Mr. Rattiner says. “They’re curious, like Curious George bees.”
That sounds sort of sweet.
No, Mr. Rattiner says.
“You can’t sit outside — the carpenter bees come over to see what you’re eating,” he says. “They don’t land on you, it’s not like menacing, it’s like having small children that aren’t yours. You just want them gone. There’s no other way to do it, and I feel very badly about it. I don’t know why they keep coming back. You’d think they’d talk to each other about what happened last year.”
Many gardeners are able to kill only one species.
“If I see a spider, I would never kill it,” says Jessica Melville, a nurse in Woodstock, Vt. “We have woodchucks in the yard; they don’t bother me at all.”
But Ms. Melville, who lives with her husband, Hunter, and two sons, is terrified of snakes. Unfortunately, her home, an 1850 farmhouse, is built into a stone wall that the local milk snakes and garter snakes love. Ms. Melville’s husband, who co-founded cyberrentals.com, explained to her that those snakes are harmful only to the insects they catch, but no matter. Before kneeling down in the perennial bed, Ms. Melville used to do what her family called her snake dance, jumping up and down, because when those snakes heard the pounding, they slithered away. If she happened to see a snake, she’d retreat into the house, and that would be it for that day’s gardening.
The Melvilles tried a granulated repellent called Snake Away. It didn’t work, so Mr. Melville, who occasionally hunts birds, bought his wife a 20-gauge shotgun. Although some might think a snake would be a difficult target, it is not. Often, when a predator is near, a snake will freeze.
“I just went up really close,” Ms. Melville says. “I was probably five feet from it. The first shot I missed. The second time I got it and then it was: ‘Oh, this is great! One less snake I have to deal with.’ ”
Ms. Melville has been shooting snakes for the last three years and estimates that she has killed about 15. But she’s killing snakes that are eating bugs? Doesn’t that distress her?
“No,” Ms. Melville says. “I’m just a happier gardener.”
Second thoughts? Regrets? Nightmares?
“Nope, never,” Ms. Melville says. “I’m just glad they’re gone.”
Regrets are even rarer among those whose livelihoods are threatened by pests.
Oskian Yaziciyan lives in Homestead, Fla., about a 20-minute drive north of Key Largo, where he runs Goldfish & Koi U.S.A., a two-and-a-half-acre ornamental fish and water lily farm. He has great feelings of affection for some of the animals other people detest. He had a pet squirrel as a boy and loves to watch squirrels. He finds them charming.
On the other hand, when he first began his business 12 years ago, and an equally adorable raccoon figured out how to depress a pipe to let the water out of a tank and ate about $6,000 worth of koi, it did not end well.
So what did Mr. Yaziciyan do?
“I’m not going to tell you,” Mr. Yaziciyan said. “I told my wife I took it to the Everglades.”
Mr. Yaziciyan has since made a practice of covering the ponds with shade cloth, netting or wire. It is not an aesthetic solution. And it doesn’t always get rid of his biggest problem: birds. Herons, which are a protected species, are a problem, as are crows, Mr. Yaziciyan wrote in an e-mail message, because they eat the eyes out of fish and snatch surface swimmers. Heron, with their rapierlike beaks, are adept killing machines.
“Koi are very expensive fish — you have a 14- or 15-inch koi, depending on the grade, it could be $50 or $2,000,” says Mr. Yaziciyan, whose own stock ranges from a more modest $5 to $500. “They go for the larger fish, your prize fish. They even kill fish they are unable to swallow. They pull it out of the water, eat its guts out.”
This eating-the-eyes-out part is casting a new light on the bucolic animal kingdom, Mr. Yaziciyan is told.
“I got a lot of blind fish,” Mr. Yaziciyan says.
Mr. Yaziciyan says he does not touch the heron. But he has gone after ravens, blue birds and crows with a net, banging their heads against a concrete or wood surface. It’s a quick death.
One visualizes a chirping cartoon bird, advising Snow White on an available share in the woods. We’re talking the bluebird of happiness, Mr. Yaziciyan. Isn’t it difficult to slam it against the concrete?
“Not really,” Mr. Yaziciyan says. “It’s a small bird. It may be a blue jay, maybe a blue bird with gray on it. I’ve seen them poke the eyes out of the fish. You gotta do what you gotta do. You got a $50 fish that is totally useless. No one will buy a fish with one eye. I got dozens of fish with one eye.”
The food chain is a brutal business. Or a natural one. Which brings us back to the artist with the groundhog problem. He was finally able to make a little bit of peace with shooting the woodchucks on his property by cooking and eating them. “It was a way of taking full responsibility for taking a life,” he says. “Almost like a spiritual journey.”
“Any number of local people offered up recipes,” the artist adds. “The guy who was doing some roofing work was Italian, and he described this wonderful recipe: essentially shallots, red wine, cured green olives, black pepper and rosemary. My father-in-law had a big helping. He declared it the best woodchuck he’d ever eaten.”
There Are Other Ways
JOHN HADIDIAN, the director of urban wildlife programs for the Humane Society of the United States, is skeptical when he hears of gardeners who claim they have tried everything to rid themselves of urban pests. He also cautions that gardeners who kill animals and birds may be breaking the law, noting that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, for example, protects most species of birds.
Killing animals often does not solve the problem. “Woodchucks are a classic case,” Mr. Hadidian says. “If you do nothing to alter the burrow system or to protect against reinvasion, it’s going to be back.”
Mr. Hadidian is the primary author of “Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife,” which offers information about wild animals as well as creative and humane methods of discouraging them from eating your plants. To protect corn from raccoons, who tend to go for it when it ripens, the book suggests leaving a radio “tuned to an all-night talk show” out in the garden on the nights just before harvest. Or one might try the more prosaic electrical fence.
For help, Mr. Hadidian suggests calling the society’s wildlife hotline, (203) 389-4411, which is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Eastern time. (It has a staff of two.)
There is also the approach offered by Catherine Wachs, a gardener who runs the Right Brain Design advertising company and lives in Larchmont, N.Y.: “I do what the Bible says: Leave the corners of your field unharvested for the poor and strangers among you.”
