I have been growing roses in this cool climate for many years. About two years ago, whether because of climate change or just migration, we were invaded by Japanese beetles, beautiful little animals with coppery wings and regular white and black dots all around.
They eat roses just when they blossom, especially the lighter-coloured ones. Nothing seems to work against them: a master gardener suggested the systemic Bayer once-a-year insecticide, which you pour into the earth around the bush just as the leaves come out. I used it. The first beetles I saw, in late June, just fell off the leaves. But after a few weeks, they consumed all the pink and lavender and multicolour roses.
La mi mujer felt my frustration: so much work, so much care, so much love, all gone to feed the beasties. She suggested I go out morning and evening with a tub of soapy water and drown the beetles. And so I did, faithfully, until medical matters diverted my attention.
I had to justify to myself the drowning. Not so much the systemic insecticide, but the highly personal killing I was undertaking. And I have not been able to do so. I have told myself these creatures, however beautiful, are destroying my property, which I have struggled to make beautiful, which I have loved and tended. And then I think, incongruously I admit, of all the genocides of the past century, and how they were rationalised by comparing the victims to a plague, to pests, to an infection.
Then there is the occasional bat. Bats are mostly 'protected species,' and we are not allowed to kill them. How one can tell them they should go away and scare (or infect) other homes is more than I know. And so they get in, one or two each summer. How they do is unknown also, but they can fit through a gap no more than a centimetre wide by folding their skeletons around their backbone.
Last month la mujer saw one flapping about the dining room, and out we ran into our backyard, and left the door open hoping the thing would fly out. It didn't, but apparently another one flew in.
So I called a friend who has an air pistol and has accounted for more mice than has his cat. He came over with two such weapons and we searched the house from Wednesday to Whitsuntide and saw no bats. It (or they) had escaped.
A few years ago I caught a bat, with the help of a robust friend. We took it outside and killed it. And after the fury of the event, I asked myself again why I wanted to condemn an entire race, a species. Why did I need to find in them something so fundamentally hateful as to justify their destruction?
Is it beyond reason to think that the effort to think of both these kinds of pests as contamination, as unclean, is just a bit reminiscent of the efforts of the worst of humanity to make Europe 'clean' of, for example, Jews?
Alex
