Cockroaches!
I didn't see that coming. When I first visited the place in May, it was
unoccupied and clean as a whistle (or so my selective vision told me). I
saw no sign of a roach and didn't even stop to consider that pests
might be an issue. When I moved in a month later, I did spy one
cockroach, which gave me palpitations, but only mild ones—I'd seen a
roach the day I moved into my last apartment, and nothing had come of
that. Fast-forward to late July. It was a month after we'd moved in, and
suddenly cockroaches were quite literally coming out of the woodwork!
(Is that where this phrase comes from?)
This
brings me to my moral dilemma. How does a vegetarian who cares for all
creatures, great and small, deal with disgusting insects that are
invading her home?
Well, every vegetarian has to draw the line somewhere. You can love all living things, but if they don't respect boundaries and
they are a legitimate threat to your way of life, then your only
recourse is to kill them. I've had to go through the same thing with bedbugs (no one can really blame you for trying to eradicate a pest that feeds on your own body) and ants.
The
ants decided my desk at work was the best place for an ongoing party!
After trying numerous times to dissuade them with various strongly
scented oils, I finally had to resort to extermination. I am not a fan
of using baits or poison. They
seem underhanded ("Come here little buggy-buggy, I have a treat for
you...it's death!") and sadistic (having suffered food poisoning
before, I would never wish that kind of fate on anyone!). And the kind of
sticky trap that causes animals to rip their own legs off in an attempt to
escape is just cruel. Another option I might have mentioned before is diatomaceous earth,
a long-established insect killer that
works by creating micro-punctures in the animal's exoskeleton, causing it
to lose too much liquid to the surrounding environment. I'm not sure
death by desiccation is really much better than many others, but at
least with a DE barrier, the bugs won't come to any harm if they just
stay clear of it and out of my space! So I dusted diatomaceous earth
around all the cracks in my window, and soon the ants were gone. Though I
was sad about my murderous ways, I could not function at work with ants
crawling all over me.
This
summer, our house for some reason developed an infestation of flies. I
was trying to ignore them, but I was so fed up by the time I went to the
Fulton County Fair, I actually picked up a free promotional flyswatter
so I could end the constant buzzing around my head. I never needed to
put the flyswatter to use, as the flies had pretty much all disappeared
by the time I brought it home, and I was relieved to not have to play
executioner to countless insects just trying to live their short lives.
Roaches, however, are a whole different story.
This
isn't my first brush with cockroaches—when I moved into an apartment
for the first time in 2006, I not only met my first cockroach; I met
thousands of them. Every
night, the roaches swarmed out from the kitchen in droves. They nested
in everything. They loved my roommate's laptop so much that they clogged
its fan and made it chronically overheat. There were so many
cockroaches in that apartment, you could smell them—it is true; they do
have a smell. And it wasn't pleasant. It didn't take me long to learn to
hate roaches with every fiber of my being—and to show cockroaches no mercy. If I were the type of person to invent mottoes, one of them
would be "Thou shalt not suffer a roach to live."
Since
I was seeing roaches with more and more frequency as August drew to a
close, I unwrapped a package of cockroach baits. With other insects, I
think of baits as a dishonest way to trick a poor unsuspecting
animal...but with roaches, I think baits are the only way to get rid of
them before they've taken over your whole house. However, the baits
aren't working. Not only did one of our stupid dogs find and eat one,
causing a brief terror (later we learned that the roach poison is
essentially harmless to humans and pets), but they didn't seem to do
anything to rid us of roaches. If anything, their population has
ballooned!
In June, I
started by seeing a nymph here or there, creeping around the bathroom or
the kitchen sink...then it escalated to a nymph or two, maybe every
other day...then I started seeing adults scuttling about. Now
(especially at night) I find multiple roaches almost every time I enter
the kitchen. One horrifying morning, I found three roaches of various ages, just
chilling out in the bottom of a saucepan in the drying rack!
I've
had to pull out all the stops for this tenacious population. No method
of extermination is too gruesome—though I still prefer a good, honest,
and quick demise like squashing them to death. That flyswatter has
finally come to use after all; I now pick it up every time I enter the
kitchen and prepare to do battle. Last night, I took all the contents
out of the two cabinets that seem to be harboring the most roaches, and
sprinkled diatomaceous earth along all the edges. And if that doesn't
slow down the little vermin, my next step will be a combo treatment with
borax.
After that? Well,
my sincere hope is that it will be nothing. I hope I'll be able to get
rid of the roaches and never see one again. Twice now, I've lived in a
house where a new resident brought her own little cockroach collection
from an infested apartment (one of those times I was that resident -
yikes!), but I've never actually faced down an already-established
colony of cockroaches. I can only hope that this isn't going to be a
multi-month war like the one against the bedbugs.
