In the story, mice once owned all land on earth. Through deciet, human
beings, especially money-lenders took away all the land. The land was
originally also given to human beings during a period of distress when
there was food scarcity, and the mice generously gave them land on the
condition that 50% of the produce would be given to the mice. But humans
soon forgot about this pledge and drove away all the mice. The current
mice 'problem', is thus interpreted as mice coming to take back what
belonged to them originally.
I think in dealing with these kinds of problems we need to essentially
find out what kind of changes have occurred in the micro-ecological niche
that have forced mice or any other species to feed off human beings. Once
we do that we ca think of probable solutions - such as alternative
pastures for deer as Argall suggested.
Last week I was touring farms in the south-western drylands in India, and
one farmer had peacocks and peahens eating up all his groundnut crop when
it was almost ready for harvest. A major reason for this problem was the
denudation by commercial interests of the nearby Sahyadri range of
mountains. The farmer decided to allow the fowl to eat up all the
groundnuts since they had no other means of sustenance. Of course not all
of us can afford to do this but this farmer not only had other resources
to fall back on but was known locally for giving up a flourishing medical
practice for agriculture, and so anything he did was crazy! We cannot all
do what he did, but it does to point to the roots of the problem.
Regards
D.Parthasarathy
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology, Powai
Mumbai, 400076, India
Phone: 091 022 576 7372
email: dp@hss.iitb.ernet.in
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".
All messages to sanet-mg are archived at:
http://www.sare.org/htdocs/hypermail