Random rant for the morning:
Today while looking at Technorati, I saw that the most popular link of the day was to this story. It’s about an elderly man in New Mexico who found a mouse in his house, took it outside, and threw it into a pile of burning leaves. The mouse, now on fire, ran back into his house and managed to set it on fire, destroying it and everything inside of it. Holy shit, right?!? Luckily, no one was injured.
Now, I understand linking to such a crazy story. But so many of the blogs I saw basically said, well, serves him right, he got what he deserved. What the fuck?!? Yeah, what he did was cruel, but what 81 year old man deserves to have his entire house and all of his possessions burnt down for killing a mouse? As if none of those people would kill a mouse if they found one in their house. Maybe they’d choose more “humane” methods of killing it, but come on – would they then deserve to stumble upon a gigantic sticky board and either starve to death or be yanked off, much of their hair, skin, and perhaps a few limbs coming off in the process?
Next time those people kill a roach or bug in their homes, I hope a huge shoe comes out of the sky and smashes their homes and everything in them.
I know a lot of elderly people who would think it’s acceptable to burn mice. It just shows how attitudes have changed in a couple of generations. Your post makes a very good point.
As a New Mexican I am sharing the following information. Many people view rodents as a pesky annoyance. In New Mexico we do not have this luxury. In New Mexico mice and other rodents carry two deadly viruses. The first is the Hantavirus (thirty eight percent of the people die as a result of the infection); New Mexico has reported 63 cases with 27 deaths. The second is the Plague (millions of people in Europe died from plague in the Middle Ages, when human homes and places of work were inhabited by flea-infested rats). Since 1949 there have been 238 cases of human plague in New Mexico, to put this in context, about half of the plague cases that occur in the U.S. occur in New Mexico. (Statistics from the NM Dept. of Health – http://www.health.state.nm.us/hanta.htmlwww.health.state.nm.us/plague.html)
The mouse’s death by inferno sounds quite miserable, but I look at this man’s act as one of health consciousness, not one of a sadistic animal torturer. These diseases are more likely to kill children, the elderly and ill. As Jack pointed out, the only thing news worthy about this story is that an elderly man now has to find new shelter and pick up the pieces of his life after a personal tragedy.