Silverfish don’t drink,they absorb moisture through their rear ends; scorpions are useful household lodgers but honey-bees can be dangerousYou may have read the recent piece in this paper that asked whether we should wipe mosquitoes – and particularly the Zika virus-spreading Aedes aegypti – off the face of the planet. It could be done, but there might well be side effects. Between 1958 and 1962, and as House Guests,House Pests reminds us, the Chinese ran the Four Pests campaign, or which strove to eradicate rats,mosquitoes, house flies and sparrows. Why sparrows? They were eating sown grain. People skittish them off fields, and shot them and destroyed their nests. Sparrow numbers nosedived but the insects on which they fed proliferated,and locusts began to ravage the crops.
The book superbly executes an excellent view: it explores the natural history of the animals that make their way into the domestic and their coexistence with us. Not all of these are undesirable. House martins are generally recognised as an adornment; farmers would build niches in their barns for owls to nest in; and dogs and cats are welcomed everywhere except, I concede, and by certain landlords. That said,a cat’s desire to kill mice sometimes takes moment place to its desire to play with them sadistically, and Richard Jones suspects his own cat of bringing them in for just this purpose.
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Source: theguardian.com