Juicy Flies

Now you may think this is a strange title "Juicy Flies" and it is. However, I'm addressing the problem of actually practicing kindness toward all living things in the universe called-Ahimsa. I took my Ahimsa vows in 1983 and have been practicing this kindness towards all life in the universe ever since.

Juicy flies applies to my daughter's dog(and the whole family's). She is a Corgi dog about 5 years old and loves to eat birds, moles, gophers, flies, squirrels and whatever else she can get a hold of in our backyard. However, she is very bad at getting squirrels and birds but very good at getting gophers and flies and insects. My wife was joking today how much our Corgi dog loved those juicy flies.

This is about practicing Ahimsa(Kindness towards all living beings in reality not theory) and I find it at times a very hard thing to do properly.

We live in the forest. So I guess you could say we live in a forest on a large plot of land on the ocean near other big plots of land.

The problem with this is also a wonderful thing. We live with deer, raccoons, birds, squirrels and everything else that lives on the Northern California Coast. However, some things can be problems like Gophers and Wood Rats. The gophers are an ongoing problem that I have learned to live with since I won't use any insecticide or herbicide anywhere on my land. However, the wood rats can be problematic in the winter. When the rains and cold come every winter and spring the rats like to move in under our house and get warm from the cold. We have tried all sorts of things over the years but in the end if we let the rats move in without any reaction they would simply destroy all insulation under our home and destroy our forced air heating system because they love to chew through the vents and cost us thousands of dollars in repairs. So, it is either the rats or us. I really don't like dealing with this every winter.

Over the years we tried things like pest control and boarding up any possible way they could get under the house until we learned that a rat can eat through concrete block when determined enough to get in somewhere. So this left us with no choice but to find a more permanent way to get rid of them from our home during the winter. Unfortunately, the choice I finally have come up with is this: If there is one dead rat under our home no rats will come under our home for 1 to 2 years until the carcass is completely gone. The easiest way to accomplish this is to get rat poison in food form from a hardware store. However, then you have another problem. The rat carcass then becomes fly food and they lay fly larva in the rat carcass. Then we have a new problem possible pestulant flies coming up through our vents for our forced air heating ducts. Now, we don't want pestulant flies(in other words flies potentially carrying disease) from the rats. So, in order to have the rat carcass there to prevent new rat families wanting to move in under our home for 1 or 2 years we have to put up with these flies for about a week.

Normally, I try to put out the flies in kindness to them without killing them outside. However, my wife tells me, "NO!" that is too dangerous. They need to be killed before they infect food or make one of us sick by their presence in the home. So, 50 to 100 flies later(I take them and give them a place in an outside planter with the narcisus growing there and I pray for their souls as I do this. My wife said today "Aren't those flies bad?" I said, "No. Their souls are good it is just that their bodies might be pestulant and they can't be allowed to fly around in our home".

So "Juicy Flies?" Only to our Corgi dog.

note: Also, I tape up the main duct vent in my daughter's bathroom that they tend to come out of but this year they are coming up another duct somewhere that I haven't found yet.

So, if you have this problem this is one of the solutions. However, hopefully you have found a better one than this.