Raccoon shit is natural, therefore it must be okay to drink

According to the Washington Post, overpopulation of deer, geese, raccoons, and other wild animals leads to excessive levels of bacteria in the water supply. If you're faced with an intractable problem, lower your standards:

Scientists have run high-tech tests on harmful bacteria in local rivers and streams and found that many of the germs -- and in the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, a majority of them-- come from wildlife dung. The strange proposition that nature is apparently polluting itself has created a serious conundrum for government officials charged with cleaning up the rivers.

Part of the problem lies with the unnaturally high populations of deer, geese and raccoons living in modern suburbs and depositing their waste there. But officials say it would be nearly impossible, and wildly unpopular, to kill or relocate enough animals to make a dent in even that segment of the pollution.

That leaves scientists and environmentalists struggling with a more fundamental question: How clean should we expect nature to be? In certain cases, they say, the water standards themselves might be flawed, if they appear to forbid something as natural as wild animals leaving their dung in the woods.

"You need to go back and say, 'Maybe the standards aren't exactly right' if wildlife are causing the problem," said Thomas Henry, an Environmental Protection Agency official who works on water pollution in the mid-Atlantic. [WaPo]

The EPA didn't just pull those standards out of its ass, so to speak. If humans are contributing to animal overpopulation, we need to tackle those problems directly. People might actually stop feeding raccoons if they realized that their drinking water was being contaminated by raccoon shit.

Comments

[twig]

People might actually stop feeding raccoons

Wait, you can STOP feeding the clever little bastards?

[ballgame]

I don't know, Lindsay. This is awfully reminiscent of Reagan's "trees are big polluters" meme. I mean, do that many people really feed racoons? Or is it more the case that certain animals are becoming adept at life in overdeveloped areas, or that overdeveloped areas lack the natural 'filters' characteristic of undeveloped areas? (I suspect the latter is a significant part of the problem.) Combination of the two?

It may turn out to be true that animal waste is contributing to excessively high bacteria levels in our waterways, but I'd be mighty slow to sign on to a 'wildlife purge' as a solution unless it's an approach endorsed by trustworthy environmental groups. Certainly suggestions that people not feed wildlife — either directly or indirectly with loose trash can lids and the like — seem reasonable enough.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Bg, as you say, it's not just the people who deliberately feed raccoons and geese. It's badly designed trash cans, the litter, and probably a lot of other controllable factors that the experts need to advise us on.

There are other ways to control population besides purging. For example, people sometimes addle eggs to keep bird populations down. I don't know if that's an option, but it might be something to look into.

The last thing we want to do is declare this problem to be a non-issue simply because we haven't bothered to think up innovative solutions, or implement the common-sense solutions that are already at our disposal.

[The Phantom]

Lots of towns in NJ and elsewhere have problems with Canadian geese which befoul the local parks. They could solve the problem tomorrow morning by an effective cull, but local animal lovers throw roadblocks at every turn.

So the local park at one place I am familiar with is so filthy with bird shit that no parents allow the kids to play there, and I'm sure that the runoff isn't helping the water quality too much either.

[Alon Levy]

In certain cases, they say, the water standards themselves might be flawed, if they appear to forbid something as natural as wild animals leaving their dung in the woods.

Welcome to the United States: a first-world military, a third-world public health system.

[Matt]

There's an easy solution to the Deer problem, at least: More cars. Cars are the number one preditor for deer in the US now so clearly we just need to drive a bit more aggressively around them and we'll solve the problem. It might work with the others, too.

[The Phantom]

Bows, arrows, rifles, much mo better.

Recall years back a proposal to cull deer nearby a town with bows and arrows, and a minority put up such a stink that it didn't take place. So the local environment went to hell.

[Dan]

Related item:
"Philadelphia Tackles Rainwater Runoff Pollution"
Morning Edition, September 29, 2006

The City of Philadelphia has set a goal to reduce the rainwater runoff that pollutes local rivers and causes flooding. They are focusing on measures to create places where rain is quickly absorbed into the ground, rather than sheeting off pavement.

[zuzu]

There's an easy solution to the Deer problem, at least: More cars. Cars are the number one preditor for deer in the US now so clearly we just need to drive a bit more aggressively around them and we'll solve the problem. It might work with the others, too.

Uh, you ever run into a deer in a car, Matt? I can tell you, it's not pretty.

[zuzu]

Recall years back a proposal to cull deer nearby a town with bows and arrows, and a minority put up such a stink that it didn't take place.

Maybe because bowhunters aren't that lethal or that accurate. I'd rather see deer killed quickly with rifles than slowly with arrows.

[cfrost]

No one did any baseline study to determine what the level of fecal coliform bacteria was around Virginia before the Roanoke colony. We know there were much more extensive wetlands, streamside vegetation, forests, and meadows, all of which slow runoff and filter water. Wildlife was doubtless better dispersed, what with cougars, wolves and native Americans chasing it about, though perhaps overall was just as, or even more, abundant. Streams and rivers had not been ditched, diked, levied, channeled, dredged, dammed, straightened, stripped of vegetation, overfished, etc. Streams meandered and had gallery forest, oxbows, gravel bars, and massive quantities of woody debris. They were shaded, hence cooler, and had a much greater surface area underwater, all of which was covered with bacteria, algae, and aquatic plants and insects which trapped stuff like coliform bacteria, smothering or eating it.

The water was basically cleaner, but would seasonally have had a significant amount of bacteria (though not fecal coliform) from millions of rotting shad and salmon carcasses. Shad and Atlantic salmon do not always die after spawning and would not have littered the shore with carcasses as densely as Pacific salmon (for which spawning is always fatal) still do in many streams in the Pacific Northwest. Shad and salmon (also sturgeon and lamprey and striped bass in lower reaches) ascended eastern streams in such quantities that even a low level of mortality would have raised the amount of nutrients in the water, feeding bacterial growth. In Pacific Northwest streams they are actually dumping biscuits made of salmon carcasses from hatcheries into streams so that they will dissolve, feed the bottom of the food chain and ultimately the juvenile salmon that eat aquatic insects. The biscuits substitute for the dead salmon that once fed the stream every fall.

As an illustration of how screwed up we’re making things with animal shit and runoff, in California sea otters are dying of brain infections caused by two parasites, Toxoplasma gondii and Sarcocystis neurona from house cats and opossums respectively. Parasite cysts in cat and opossum crap wash downstream (helped no doubt, by paving, ditching, etc.) and into the ocean where they are vacuumed up by the shellfish that sea otters eat. Both cats and opossums are not native to California, but are now found over most of the state, particularly where the climate is mild, like along the coast. Sea otters which had nearly been exterminated by the fur trade are no longer recovering their range in California. (Sea otters in Alaska are now being gobbled up by killer whales, perhaps as a result of commercial fishing, but that’s for another post.)

Unintended and unforeseen consequences are more the rule than the exception. We’re now in completely uncharted waters. In the billion-odd years life has existed on earth there has never been anything remotely like a large animal that alters nearly every habitat and nearly every river on all continents and all large islands. According to the Census Bureau the U.S. population will reach 300 million probably this month. Every one of those people lives in some watershed upon which they will have some effect. To put things into perspective though, there are approximately a half billion people living in the Ganges basin, which still has some semblance of its native fauna, so there’s still hope.

Aside: It’s Canada goose, Branta Canadensis, not Canadian goose, which is just any old goose found amongst our friendly neighbors to the north.

[cfrost]

Branta canadensis not Canadensis. Damned automatic spellchecker.

[The Phantom]

zuzu

No, this would have been done by professionals in an --extremely-- controlled setting. I don't think it would have been unsafe at all.

And the original proposal was to do the job with rifles--but these comfy New Jersey suburbanites really freaked out over that.

[The Phantom]

--Canada goose--

Noted. Eh?

[T. Bailey]

If human-induced overpopulation is the problem, we need to address/tackle it directly.

Hasn't China tried this? Though it seems to me that there are a lot of people out there who think China's solution is pretty authoritarian. It's hard to really say what the correct human population size should be, but there is an intuitive sense that it's way too high right now. Most of the major culling/population reduction efforts underway right now are drawing a lot of criticism.

[cfrost]

Hunting might thin some herds of deer, though not those that live in suburbs. You can paint goose eggs with diesel to addle them and the parents, thinking the eggs are just taking a very long time to hatch, won't lay another clutch. You have to find and gain access to the nests though. You can eat geese, though I'm not sure I'd want to eat a goose fattened on herbicide-soaked park or graveyard lawns. As for thinning raccoons, good luck. Raccoon populations where I live are periodically swept by distemper, but that only knocks them back temporarily.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I don't mean curtailing the human population of the DC suburbs. I meant dealing with the animals, the environmental conditions that lead to animal over-population, or practices that exacerbate the impact of the animals (e.g., paving, destruction of wetlands, etc., etc.).

I should probably go back and edit that sentence, lest people think I'm advocating a One Child policy for the Capitol region.

[mike]

cfrost - Here in the northwest I have also heard them called Brants (Brandts?) geese. Or is that another breed??

[T. Bailey]

I should probably go back and edit that sentence, lest people think I'm advocating a One Child policy for the Capitol region.

I should probably go back and add a smiley to the end of my comment.

;)

[cfrost]

Mike-
The genus Branta includes the Canada goose, B. canadensis (N. America, introduced in Europe), Barnacle goose B. leucopsis (Eurasia, Greenland), red-breasted goose B. ruficollis (Eurasia) and the goose we call a brant in N. America and the English speakers on the other side of the Atlantic call a brent: B. bernicla (circumpolar). (You can see all of these species, I think, in the movie “Winged Migration”.) Brant are mostly salt-water geese divided in the US into two races that live on east and west coasts. The western (black brant) has a dark belly and the eastern (American brant) has a white belly. They eat mainly eel grass, Zostera marinus, an interesting salt-water flowering plant –not an algae. Brant depend on, and are limited by Zostera abundance. In the 1930s a slime mold Labyrinthula zosterae (an even more curious organism) peculiar to Zostera infected the eel grass beds on the east coast causing a massive die off, with consequent harm to the eastern brant. Eel grass forms the basis of an ecological community of which brant are only one of many members. Herring, for instance, like to spawn in eel grass beds. Eel grass unfortunately is very susceptible to anthropogenic screwing, which is to say that eel grass beds are vanishing left and right, along with the biota they support.

I’m writing this in part to answer the question regarding brant, and also to avoid doing the dishes.

[DLake]

Hmmm, when I saw the headline here, I thought that perhaps weasel shit coffee was making a comeback.

(http://www.sallys-place.com/beverages/coffee/kopi_luwak.htm)

I remember Dave Barry writing about this some years ago...something about 'Mocha Crappacinos,' etc...My own take was that some bored and/or enterprising person in Indonesia came to the conclusion that people in rich countries were so pretentious, they'd drink weasel crap if you told them it was a delicacy (and made it expensive enough). Yep.

[Monkeyfister]

Part of the problem lies with the unnaturally high populations of deer, geese and raccoons living in modern suburbs and depositing their waste there.

Do they mean the suburbs that USED to be the the forested habitat for the above-mentioned animals and fowl, and only recently became habitat to an ugly invasive species of pasty White People on Factory McMansion Ranches?

Hmmm. I suspect that part of the problem is one of perception.

Don't get me started on the Chem Lawn and Round-Up run-off into the water system... all those automotive fluids, and hey-- what about all those un-metabolized Pharmaceuticals that we're pissing into the water system daily... Yeah... perception.

--mf

[Alethea]

I moved out of the Boston area 20 years ago, and upon my infrequent returns, the Canadian goose problem has happened in my hometown as well. There were always some, like the mallard ducks, down by the waterways. Now they are on every median strip, in every park, in most people's back yards. And true, parents with little kids are sort of freaked out by having said kids attacked. I have no problem with culling, but what to do with the bodies? We've bred these birds just as much as battery-raised chickens. I'd prefer something useful if possible...

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I was attacked by a goose as a small child. Raccoons tore open my rabbit hutch ate half my pet rabbit. Suburban infestations are no joke.

[Cass]

The large deer population in west Austin has attracted coyotes the last couple of years, who are blamed for the disappearance of several neighborhood cats. I ran into a couple of them once while walking my dog; they didn't seem in the least intimidated.