Tiny Game Hunting: Environmentally Healthy Ways to Trap and Kill the Pests in Your House and Garden

Preface to the New Edition

Since our book first appeared in 1991, the pests-versus-pesticides predicament has both improved and deteriorated. The good news is that many more products have appeared on the market for people wishing to avoid toxic chemicals. Garden centers, hardware stores, and the Internet commonly offer tiny game hunting products, from insecticidal soaps and repellent sprays to low-toxicity dusts and traps. Insectaries that breed beneficial insects are more numerous, and scientists are working on new ways to battle insects with biological controls that affect only the targeted pest. Organic food is less of a novelty, and organic farmers have proven that their yields can equal or exceed conventional yields.

The bad news, however, keeps getting worse. As our groundwater and air are increasingly tested, and as more scientific studies appear, we are beginning to get a glimpse of the devastating consequences of the flood of toxins that have been, and continue to be, poured, sprayed, squirted, and pumped over the earth. The dangerous deception that these chemicals will not harm us is becoming more and more apparent.

Yet the deluge is growing, not lessening. In the United States, an incredible 4.5 billion pounds of pesticides are used each year. In California, according to the Los Angeles Times, application of toxic compounds more than doubled between 1991 and 1995. Is it doing any good? American farmers are spraying two to five times more than they did thirty years ago, some say tenfold since World War II. Yet the loss of crops to insect damage has risen from 7 to 13 percent.

Is the government capable of protecting us? The number of secret inert ingredients (ones that don’t have to be listed on labels) in pesticides has doubled in ten years. Inert ingredients are sometimes more toxic than the active ingredient in a pesticide. What you don’t know can hurt you.

World Resources Institute issued a report warning that exposures to pesticides pose a serious public health threat by depressing the immune system. In the past few years, pesticides have also been implicated in the disruption of endocrine systems and hormone function. Scientists have noted the feminization of animals, from alligators in Florida to polar bears in the Arctic. Human sperm counts have declined between 33 and 42 percent in the past fifty years, according to some European studies.

The EPA has identified as potential human carcinogens ninety-six pesticides currently in use. Rates of certain cancers, such as testicular and prostate cancer, have increased alarmingly. In 1960, one in twenty women found themselves with breast cancer; now it is one in eight. Last year, Parkinson’s was added to the list of diseases attributed to pesticide exposure. And pesticides are now known to interfere with neurological development in children.

Humans are not, of course, the only victims. Researchers at Cornell have estimated that more than 67 million birds are killed each year by pesticides applied legally to U.S. farmland. Fish also die by the millions, as do bees necessary for pollination.

But we humans can take action. As consumers, we play an important role in our profit-driven society, and we can help turn the tide. So take the time to learn about the pests that plague you and choose the safest way to manage them.

We give you the tactics; we trust in your success.

INTRODUCTION

common They creep, they crawl, they fly, they slime. They chew, suck, nibble, and devour . . . and they never give up.

We plant our gardens lovingly and laboriously, anticipating the pleasure and payoff in flowers and fresh vegetables. Then one day we go outside and the garden looks as if Sherman’s troops had marched through it. Armies of bugs have chewed the little green poppy plants, the lovely lettuce is wilted, and the rosebuds are obscured by a teeming mass of frothy white trespassers. It’s war.

We go into the kitchen early in the morning to start making breakfast. It takes a few minutes before we suddenly realize that we are sharing our home with hundreds—no, thousands!—of brazen ants, who are behaving as if our honey jar were their gift from the gods. It’s war.

The dog does nothing but itch and scratch. He has lost most of the hair off the top of his rear, and the last time we dusted him with flea powder, he seemed to be having some kind of a fit. It’s war.

Our second grader has been sent home from school with lice for the third time this year. Now we have to treat everyone in the family, vacuum like crazy, and do twenty-four loads of laundry. It’s war.

Trying to protect our territory from persistent alien invaders can’t help but stir up the primal juices. It’s the good guys against the bad and we know which we are. We have the moral righteousness of the attacked on our side, while those tiny trespassers deserve all the fury we can heap on them.

Off we go to any number of home improvement centers, nurseries, or hardware stores. We walk up and down the aisles and study the vast array of poisons available to us. Notice the slightly sickening, noxious smell that emanates from the shelves. (Can this be good for the employees?) We squint at the labels with their chemical mumbo jumbo and their warnings. Remember that article we just read about the end of nature. Wish we knew of a better way to take care of this.

INCREDIBLE INSECTS

Insects have been on this planet since before the first cockroach appeared 300 million years ago. Not only did they precede us by more than 200 million years, but termites had air-conditioning before we had houses, and wasps could paralyze their prey before we had anesthesia. Lowly, small, primitive, thoughtless, and short-lived though they may be, insects are nevertheless the most successful creatures on earth.

There may be as many as 10 million different species, of which perhaps a million have been described. To add to the amazing variety and complexity of life forms they present, most of these insects change their shape during development, from egg to larva to pupa to adult. The earth has spawned such a diversity of remarkable creatures that I sometimes wonder why we do not all live in a state of perpetual awe and astonishment, Howard Ensign Evans once wrote.

We do not, however, hold bugs in awe. Even though they can outwork us, outlift us, outjump us, and outfly us, we despise more than respect them. They seem to us to live only to reproduce and to eat or be eaten. They are so utterly different from us, they seem aliens in our world. Insects have no lungs, yet they must have oxygen to live. Some have no ears, although their sensitivity to vibrations is acute. Others have no noses but can smell incredibly well. They may have ears below their knees, gills under their abdomens, or breathing tubes on their sides. They learn nothing from their parents but are born knowing everything they need to know. They carry their skeleton on the outside of their body, their blood is seldom red, and they walk on myriad legs. Is it any wonder that we have problems with insects? We regard them alternately with loathing and fear, fascination and disgust. We are woefully ignorant about them and most often end up killing the ones we need, while failing to control the pestiferous ones.

Insects exist even in the Antarctic, where temperatures drop to 85° below zero. Collections made from airplanes reveal that a column of air one mile square probably contains 25,000 insects. An acre of typical English pasture may contain over a billion arthropods (insects, spiders, mites, centipedes, etc.). We make calculations about the vast incomprehensible distances of space, but right here on earth there may be a billion billion insects. Try to write out that number.

Until the middle of the seventeenth century, most people in the Western world believed that insects came into existence through spontaneous generation. They were generally thought to be bred by corruption or from the dew on the leaves. Humans often turned for help to the Church, which regularly excommunicated insects for their misdeeds. Yet little progress was made toward controlling pests; even the most noxious ones, such as fleas, rats, and lice, were tolerated as an inevitable part of life.

Insects have always been our prime competitors on this planet. They eat our food, our clothing, and our houses. They even feed on us and transmit terrible diseases. A state of complacency regarding them has never been in our best interests. However, once we decided to get tough on pests, we really went overboard. We picked methods that harmed us as much as them.

We embarked on an indiscriminate, all-out war against insects. Better living through chemistry tried to teach us that all bugs are bad bugs and that the only good bug is a dead bug. But less than 1 percent of all insects are pests. Most are extremely beneficial. Without insects, animals like fish, reptiles, birds, and certain mammals would have nothing to eat and would starve. Furthermore, as the entomologist E. O. Wilson has pointed out, without the recycling of organic matter that insects carry out, dead vegetation would pile up and dry out all over the world, killing off plants and animals.

It may seem odd to talk about how necessary insects are in a book on tiny game hunting (and trapping and killing and repelling), but part of the problem with our pest control tactics up until now has been that we tried to annihilate them so utterly that we began to take out the birds, the fish, the bees, and a lot more along with the pests. If we keep in mind what an important role some insects and spiders play, we can control them more successfully.

THE TOXIC TIDE

Before we came up with the magic bullet of chemical pesticides, people were much more inventive about dealing with pests. Then the idea caught on that we could take care of the whole problem with a few squirts or sprays, and we got lazy. We thought if we dusted the dog, we wouldn’t have to vacuum; if we put up a no-pest strip, we wouldn’t have to repair the screen door; if we had the house fumigated, we would never again have to look for termites. We opted for the neutron bomb of pesticides and thought we were winning the war.

We read that American farmers will apply 24 million tons of fertilizer and 1 billion pounds of pesticides on our land this year. How much of this will end up in our water, our air, our food, our body fat and breast milk? Indeed, the U.S. Geological Survey has reported that every sample of stream water taken from a developed watershed was found to have pesticide contaminants. And the EPA reports that pesticides are now a major threat to groundwater.

Although TV commercials make using pesticides look perfectly safe, safety is one of the great fallacies surrounding these chemicals. The EPA says that each year millions of people suffer side effects such as nausea, dizziness, and headaches from pesticides. These are just the short-term effects. More than 80 percent of the most commonly used pesticides today have been classified as carcinogenic by the National Academy of Science. At the same time, cancer rates are increasing dramatically every year (breast cancer by 2 percent, children’s cancers by 1 percent). Pesticides have also been implicated in causing learning disabilities and hyper-aggression in children. What are we doing to ourselves?

Not only are we using more pesticides, we are making them more dangerous. Mixing two pesticides together greatly magnifies their toxicity. For instance, in 1996, Science reported that a mixture of endosulfan and dieldrin, two organochlorides, produced an estrogenic effect 1,600 times more potent than each chemical alone. Most fruits and vegetables are sprayed with as many as five chemicals.

The blind application of pesticides amounts to an admission that insects are smarter than we are. We believe, however, that human beings are cleverer than insects. Practicing hazardous chemical warfare against pests should never take the place of the three Os of tiny game hunting: observe, outwit, and outlast.

Doing battle with pests using the tactics of tiny game hunting is actually more gratifying than spraying with toxic chemicals. You will derive great satisfaction from trapping pests without guilt, discouraging them without peril, and keeping them away by understanding their particular habits. There is only one hard-and-fast rule for the tiny game hunter: Don’t use any weapon to kill pests that could possibly kill you too.

PART 1

TINY GAME HUNTING

IN THE HOME

THE FOLLY OF PESTICIDES

HOME, TOXIC HOME

How many pesticides were you exposed to today? Perhaps there was the ant poison in the yard, the houseplant spray in the living room, the fly spray on the porch, the herbicide on the lawn, the roach killer in the kitchen.

How about the long-lasting pesticides around the house? The termite treatment around the foundations, the mothball vapors in the closet, the vapor-emitting pest strip in the basement? And that’s just at home. The restaurant where you lunched may have recently been sprayed. The office has a regular extermination contract. The bus you took may have just been sprayed or fumigated, as well as the bank, the doctor’s office, the department store, and, of course, the park and the golf course. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, billions of pounds of pesticides are used annually. Every breath you took today may have had a little whiff of poison in it. The same goes for every bite you took. If you eat more than 1.2 pounds of broccoli, you exceed your legal dose of pesticides for the year. Same goes for a quarter of a cantaloupe. A 1999 Environmental Working Group report, They Are What They Eat: Kids’ Food Consumption and Pesticides, stated that 20 million children under the age of five eat an average of eight pesticides a day—that’s 2,900 pesticide exposures per child per year from food alone—not water, not air, not skin absorption. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Oh, and forty suspected carcinogens now appear in U.S. drinking water. How much do you think your body can take?

Keep in mind, too, that if you use chemicals on your lawn, you have them in your carpeting. Once indoors, they could be present for up to a year. And after pesticides have been used indoors, residues have been found to remain on toys (think babies’ mouths) for a least two weeks.

Most people think DDT went away when it was banned in the United States in 1972. Wrong. Its profitability lived on, and it continued to be manufactured and exported in enormous quantities to other countries. (Mexico and Brazil each used nearly 1,000 tons—that’s 2 million pounds—of DDT in 1992 alone.) Today, it is one of the commonest pesticides found on food in U.S. grocery stores. It has been linked to breast cancer. Almost everyone has DDT-related compounds in his or her body.

Many houses today have become traps for even longer-lasting toxins. Before chlordane was taken off the shelves in 1987, it was used against ants and termites (as well as other pests) in more than 30 million homes. Because it was made to decompose very slowly, it could remain active indoors, protected from the elements, for twenty years. It also accumulates in body fat and is known to make people very sick. Chlordane is considered a carcinogen, as well as a hazardous substance, a hazardous waste, and a priority toxic pollutant (according to the EPA). And yet chlordane, like DDT, continued to be shipped to other countries by its manufacturer long after its ban here, and it probably returns to this country in imported food items in what is called the circle of poison.

HOME, SAFE HOME

One control method that works for all pests is exclusion. Keeping them out of the house is the simplest and most efficient way to deal with them. Screens provide a true coat of armor for the home. One of the reasons malaria still rages in some hot countries is that many homes lack screens. Screens should also be placed over chimneys and vents. And since rats and cockroaches live in sewers, city dwellers should make sure that shower and bath drains have strainers. Houses should be thoroughly inspected for holes and cracks through which insects can enter. Any openings where utility wires and pipes enter the house should be sealed.

Because many pests require moisture, all pipes and faucets should be checked for drips. Toilet bowls should be bolted securely to the floor and have no leaks. Condensation of pipes should be prevented with wrapping. Repair them out! could be the battle cry of the tiny game hunter.

Starve them out! could be another. Always put food (and pet food) away, or store it in pest-proof containers. Counters should be kept scrupulously clean.

Regular vacuuming is a major tactical assault against pests. Also, make a point to do a thorough spring-cleaning at least once a year. Turn the whole house inside out and rout all the critters hiding in closets and behind heavy furniture.

Apartment dwellers have to protect themselves on two fronts: from pests that enter from the great outdoors and from those that wander in from the neighbors’. All the occupants of an apartment building should meet and coordinate a sound, safe method of pest control, including how garbage is to be managed and what kind of nontoxic pest treatments can be used. Having each lone apartment dweller fiercely fighting individual battles at different times just makes the pest population move around within the building.

There is no such thing as a permanent solution to our pest problems. Thinking that we can get rid of our pests permanently in one fell swoop is like believing we will be clean for the rest of our life after taking a shower.

QUITTING PESTICIDES FOR GOOD

AND DISPOSING OF THEM

Giving up toxic pesticides is a little like giving up cigarettes. One day you think you can’t possibly live without them, and the next you realize how much better everything is now that you no longer depend on them. Soapy water kills ants just as dead as the poison spray that used to go up your nose. The mousetrap kills just as dead as the poison, and it won’t kill the dog, either.

When you give up these poisons outdoors, you may have a period of higher insect damage. Be prepared to plant more plants, handpick the bugs, and use a few repellent sprays. The natural predators may take a while to return to your garden. It may take a few years for the balance of nature to restore itself. Remember, the pests always show up before the predators, so don’t panic. In the meantime, use the tactics described in this book to hunt them down. Improve your soil with lots of organic content and minerals so that the plants are strong enough to withstand insect attack. People who would prefer a garden completely devoid of insects should possibly find something else to do with their time. We have to live with insects; we just don’t have to be overwhelmed by them.

The main problem in giving up house and garden insecticides is what to do with the poisons you aren’t going to use anymore. Incidentally, if the label says POISON or DANGER—the highest warning given—the contents are highly toxic. WARNING or CAUTION means the contents are toxic, but not as toxic. PRECAUTION means the government doesn’t know whether the contents are hazardous or not. Some people do not even call these chemicals pesticides; they call them biocides, because they kill all life.

If you want to know more about any of the pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides you have been storing at your house, you can call the EPA-funded twenty-four-hour hotline at (800) 858-7378. Or contact the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, 530 Seventh Street SE, Washington, D.C. 20003, (202) 543-5450.

Do not pour any of these products down the drain, or bury them, or flush them down the toilet! Many of these pesticides are highly toxic to fish and other wildlife. Do not toss them in the garbage either. They must be disposed of according to the laws regulating toxic pollutants. Call your local waste management division or health department and ask if they have a collection program for toxic chemicals. Or look in the yellow pages under environmental groups. Many cities have established certain days and locations for people to bring in their paints, pesticides, motor oil, and other toxic materials, which are then disposed of in special toxic waste dumps to prevent their ending up in landfills and groundwater. When you realize how hard it is just to dispose of these chemicals safely, you begin to understand the problems of using them. And they won’t stop being manufactured until we stop purchasing them.

Incidentally, pest control operators can’t use soapy water, because it is not on their list of EPA-registered pesticides, a sort of catch-22 that, unfortunately, encourages more toxic pesticide use. If you do call an exterminator, look for one that uses the least toxic and most environmentally friendly methods. Interview the person carefully and ask a lot of questions. Look for exterminators who practice integrated pest management, or I.P.M. But make sure their interpretation of I.P.M. isn’t inject pesticides monthly. Don’t automatically believe phrases like environmentally friendly in their ads. (A number of them have recently been sued for this kind of greenwashing.) If you find yourself arguing over the semantics of toxic with an exterminator, or if one tries to tell you, It’s not how toxic they are; it’s how carefully they are handled, go elsewhere. This is not a linguistic debate. Reducing the world’s dependence on hazardous pesticides requires tangible, positive action, not compromise and consumer vacuousness.

You just can’t make the excuse anymore that it’s just a little bit of pesticide. Pesticides are used by 1 million farms and in 70 million households in the United States. Those numbers attest to a lot of decision makers, and you are one of them. Take responsibility! In addition to not using pesticides yourself, talk your friends out of them too. Support activist organizations. And buy organic food, which is one more way to keep hazardous pesticides out of the home. When you buy organic, you are supporting a way of life—taking care of the earth—that has profound implications for the future.

COMMON PESTS

ANTS

Some people believe that the cockroach will take over the world, but we bet on the lowly ant. Breeding colonies of ants, sometimes known as superorganisms, are resistant to both radiation and industrial pollution. Colonies of some species can even survive in flooded ground. In terms of sheer biomass, ants, along with termites, are the dominant insect species on earth. They not only outnumber us; they outweigh us. When it comes to social organization and cooperation, they are in some ways more evolved than humans, acting for the survival of the colony rather than the individual. Various ant species plant crops, herd other insects for food, wage ferocious wars, take slaves, and live with elaborate caste structures. Interestingly, ant colonies are virtual female societies; males are bred only occasionally and only for procreation.

Besides being utterly impossible, it would be foolish to attempt to eliminate all your ants, because in many ways ants are our friends and allies, and we need them. In China, ants have been used for thousands of years to help control pests in orchards, making them the first insects known to be used for biological control. Ants actually help control pests that we haven’t always been very successful controlling on our own. Both indoors and out, they eat the eggs and larvae of fleas, flies, spiders, bed bugs, and probably silverfish and clothes moths. They also go after cockroaches and conenose bugs. In addition, ants patrol the perimeters of our houses and keep termites, their mortal enemies, from establishing colonies in our homes. If we let them do their job, that is.

Of the more than 8,800 known species of ants worldwide, only a small number will invade homes, some arriving in search of sweets, others drawn to meat and greasy stuff. The most common ants seen inside of houses are the Argentine ant (very small, brown, nests outdoors, prefers sweets, eliminates almost all other species of ant in the neighborhood); the pharaoh ant (small, light yellow or reddish, nests inside of buildings, attracted to all kinds of foods); the thief or grease ant (resembles the pharaoh ant, prefers meaty or greasy foods, sometimes lives in the nests of other ants); the pavement ant (brown or black, hairy, will eat just about anything, nests under stones, around pavement, or in foundations); and the odorous house ant (small, brown or black, gets its name from its unpleasant coconut odor when crushed).

The worst ant to have in the house is the carpenter ant, which lives in wood and