rat race

RAT RACE


Today was a red letter day in Bison country. I was pretty excited to get my book order containing “Survival Gunsmithing” and “Survival Skills Of The North American Indians”, but then I got a huge box full of old Mother Earth News magazines from the seventies and eighties, sent to me by a loyal minion. Yes, I have the complete first two decades on CD, but the original paper versions with the graphics and old ads are a great nostalgic trip back to my youth. This doesn’t have much to do with anything other than I get to brag on it and make you feel inferior and deprived. Sure, you commute to work in climate controlled comfort and live in a huge house and are owned by a trophy wife, but you don’t have as nice of a library as I do. Get your priorities straight, damn you.

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You know how when you are invited to a black tie affair and you and all your ivy league school buddies are standing around sipping sherry and commenting on the deplorable condition of today’s imported caviar, when suddenly somebody farts? And not just an uncomfortable breakage of wind but a huge ripping explosion that has just an edge of the sound of wetness to it? And then everyone is just confused and an uncomfortable silence descends on the whole ballroom? That’s what it feels like from here with my just published fiction. Thanks if you are just trying to spare my feelings, but if you haven’t read it yet, go to http://www.bisonfiction.blogspot.com/

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I know you are too busy with above mentioned SUV and McMansion to worry about such things, but it bothers me when cannibalism is mentioned in fiction without any science behind it. I haven’t yet read “Through Darkest America”, ( I own it but have yet to get around to reading it ) but it seems the concept of raising humans for meat violates common sense energy requirements. The “Lost Battalion” series seems to make sense, in that the ravaging hordes only harvest the human meat every ten years or so. And only a certain percentage. And the humans feed themselves. But if you were raising captive humans for meat, penned up and fed in a stockyard, then the return on feed is hideous. Off the top of my head, I think it takes three pounds of grain to produce one pound of chicken and something like seven for beef. If you were to raise a human on the standard American diet of extra calories it would be 1:562 for a twenty year old. Okay, even if you harvested the meat before puberty and fed them less calories, you are still looking at hundreds to one calorie return.

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I somehow switched over to PBS last night on the TV and encountered “Nova”. I usually enjoy it, but never seem to get around to figuring out when it is on and if I should watch it on a regular basis. The program was “Rat Attack”. At first I just thought it was another animal program. Not that they are bad, but after watching my fill of Mutual Of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom when young it isn’t something I seek out much. You see one hour of lions acting just like your housecat ( twenty three hours of napping followed by a few vicious attacks on dust bunnies ), you’ve seen them all. Ah, but this episode was a little more exciting than that. This involved exponential population growth followed by die-off. Bing! We have a winner. Bring on the death and destruction. I didn’t catch if this was a new country or a part of India, although there was something about a rebellion fifty years earlier due to inadequate famine relief ( featuring a short clip of rebels stacking Lee-Enfields which let me tell you definitely tingled my sphincter ). Just west of Burma. Anyway, there are a lot of bamboo forests there and every forty eight years the bamboo dies after producing a fruit that falls to the forest floor. There is enough fruit to begin the growth process over again, and also to feed a huge explosion in the black rat population. Colonial records confirm the historical trend of fruit followed by famine.

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Black rats are the world record holders in the rat kingdom for reproduction. They can hump like rabbits. A litter is weaned in three weeks and about six weeks after that the females reproduce ( I might be slightly off, doing this by memory ). When food is scarce, their reproductive cycle slows down and mom will even eat a few of the babies to keep the population in check. But when the bamboo starts raining fruit, everything changes. The lifetime litters double. The reproductive cycle is in overdrive, the female being pregnant and giving birth just as the last batch is weaned. You will have a population of about a hundred rats per acre of bamboo forest in normal times and suddenly, very quickly, you can have up to twelve thousand per acre. The rats eat all the fruit ( until the time the fruit germinates and then is inedible ) and then, there being a lot of them and they being slightly hungry again the next day, they move on to the rice fields ( dry land rice, not paddy rice ). After thirty weeks from the first fruit falling, the rats run out of edible bamboo food and move on to the farm. By then they are in their forth population surge and at that twelve thousand number. Then they all die when the food is gone.

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Gee, do you think I could be eluding to the behavior of recent human population explosion here? Rats can keep their population under control until there is a never ending new food source available. Then they lose all restraint. Humans, at least in hunter/gatherer societies prior to the Agricultural Revolution, were very good at limiting their population to survive off of the lands production. But as soon as “unlimited” food is available, they just keep humping like bunnies. It was bad enough after we started farming, but those were short term, slight up ticks in the numbers. A bad harvest kills maybe a quarter of the population. But with coal and oil, and especially since the artificial nitrogen manufacturing process was perfected in or right before World War One , we have lost all reproduction restraint and our numbers have skyrocketed. Rat die off after the bamboo fruit, 99%. Human die-off after oil ( and not after ALL the oil is gone, but after ENOUGH is gone, 99%.

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We’ve covered this before. I hope you are listening. We are no smarter than rats, collectively. If it makes you feel better, perhaps this behavior is implanted in our DNA and we have no control over it. You can agitate all you want for green, permaculture, wind farm, Birkenstock wearing, Volvo driving lifestyles. If it doesn’t enrich those that control the resources, it will not happen. Period. All those authors that waste trees spelling out how this fantasy must happen are pissing into a hurricane. I can just hear the rats now. Gee, perhaps the fruit will fall before the next forty-eight year cycle, all evidence of history to the contrary ( gee, maybe oil is the first energy source that won’t run out ).

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