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AT 15:30 this afternoon, I watched someone die. For a minute after the life left her tortured body, unnerving twitches pulsed through her legs and flanks, but she was gone. The rapid gasping breath that had filled the twin-cab on our desperate dash to the clinic, the vomiting and jerking, the brutal struggle for life, all stilled in an instant.
She was a tan-coloured dog, the loved pet of a poor family who had kept her safe in an enclosed yard. Yet somehow she had encountered aldicarb, the deadly and rapid-acting poison responsible for so many animal deaths. “Twelve cases so far this week – and it’s not an unusual week,” Cora Bailey told me (Bailey works for Community-led Animal Welfare, known as CLAW – CLAW is affiliated to the International Fund for Animal Welfare).
I sat next to her as she made the phone call to tell the family that their precious dog was dead. I could hear the man’s voice: “Oh no… oh no… oh no…”
In both prosperous and poor communities this poison is used to kill watchdogs in preparation for burglary, but in the poor townships which CLAW serves, aldicarb is mostly used for rat control; dogs and cats pick up poisoned flesh used as bait, and unless they receive treatment immediately, they suffer a cruel, horrendous death.
This version of aldicarb (used to protect cotton, tobacco, peanuts, sweet potato and other crops against pests) is manufactured and heavily used in China, and is more potent than the original, says Bailey. (Aldicarb was developed by the ill-fated Union Carbide – remember Bhopal? – but eventually ended up in the hands of Bayer, which has agreed to phase it out completely by 2018.)
Chinese aldicarb is often brought into South Africa by migrants, who use it as currency, selling it to make a little money. It’s sold everywhere: outside a supermarket in Roodepoort, and at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital and Dobsonville taxi ranks…
And it’s not ‘just dogs’. Either. With World Suicide Prevention Day (September 10) just behind us, it’s worth noting that aldicarb is widely used to commit suicide – Gauteng Provincial Health Department mortuary statistics show that over 500 people have used ‘rat poison’ to commit suicide this year already, up from 362 last year (Bailey says that almost without fail, the substance used will be the cheap and readily available aldicarb).
Aldicarb is often referred to as Two Step (two steps and you drop dead), but it doesn’t act quite that fast. Having listened to that poor dog battle through her last moments, my heart misgives me at the thought of how these suicides will have suffered. And as for the little children who have been accidentally poisoned…!
Of course people will do their best to counter the gangs of huge, aggressive rats which roam their streets and have been known to scavenge on infants in their cradles and on the disabled. This is not an argument against doing so.
War on litter
No, this is an argument for a concerted drive to deal with the rodents. To get rid of aldicarb, we must deal with the reason it’s used. The animals swarm in the chain of informal and semi-formalised settlements that ring Johannesburg, hidden from view by mine dumps or distance from the roads.
I know the City of Johannesburg announced last year that it had set aside R2.5m to deal with rats. Barn Owls were released into an Alexandra that apparently “welcomed” the birds – but about two weeks later, people were killing ‘em (people are frightened of owls, you see).
And a pilot project from March 2012 caught something like 28 000 rats – sounds good, neh, but what’s the point when a pair of rats can produce 2 000 offspring in a year when times are good? And where there’s litter, times are very good indeed.
People who see the rubbish piled up in these communities often ask why “these people” don’t “pick up their litter”. And do what with it? Take a taxi to the dump some 15 kilometres away? The desperately poor have far fewer resources than you or I, who live where rubbish is removed once a week and pest control is on call even if it’s at a cost.
Despite the promise of community works programmes, in many cases there’s no litter pick-up here for weeks on end. The resultant piles of garbage create the rat plague – this and illegal dumping, which often happens close to these forsaken communities.
A practical, effective war on litter is needed to manage the rodents and get rid of aldicarb. Incentivise communities to take an active part in cleaning up (competitions, stipends, that sort of thing), then provide the wherewithal to enable them to do it religiously, daily. Part of that wherewithal is regular-as-clockwork garbage pick-up.
Police illegal dumping fiercely. (I have heard from at least three people who have tried to get action on illegal dumpers with no luck.) Get corporates involved as a practical (if not pretty) form of social responsibility. And clamp down hard on sellers of the poison.
This is a public health problem with huge costs to our municipalities.
But in the end, that’s not what it’s about. In the end, it comes down to preventing suffering. That lonely soul, retching and juddering and struggling to suck in her last breaths.
Man, woman, child or dog, that’s too high a price to pay.
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
