flow wrote:
Hey guys, what are your opinions on animal pesticide testing?
There are some new alternatives emerging that look pretty promising.
I hope there are alternatives that are promising. I don't know whether many of the ones previously approved, then taken off the market, or not, were tested on animals. They certainly, in many cases, were not tested enough, or tested for breakdown products or just what would happen to them in nature, from runoff, to groundwater. Was DDT tested enough? NO. In one year in Mesa County, CO, 35 wells were shut down from too high of pesticide residues in their well water. Many have been found to be extremely long lived and some of the organo-phosphates linked to prion diseases. Herbicides and pesticides have been found in many municipal water supplies, with long term low dose and interactions with other pollutants like pharmaceuticals unknown! WE are the guinea pigs!!!
I'll never forget back when I was a crop sprayer in Bottineau County NoDak in 1972. I was in too much of a hurry to put on rubber gloves in mixing Toxaphene for a small field grasshopper plague. One small drop got on my hand and I just wiped it off and washed my hands. The field was surrounded by telephone and power lines, requiring very good timing. When I was on my second pass, I started feeling woozy and weird. I circled for 15 minutes then decided to go back and get the field later. I was poisoned too much to fly any more until the afternoon when the effects finally wore off. I learned several lessons, needless to say. Sure, I saved the county from the grasshopper plague that year. I knew how fast they could take out a 60 acre field (half a day). I thought about how strong that stuff was and what did exactly happen to the residue?? Probably to the nearest river and down to the ground water eventually. I thought about the 2-4-D herbicide, too. Sure, I could identify 6 different noxious weeds at 90 mph low level and use the right mixture for each for maximum yields of wheat and oats. I sprayed Malathion on homesteads for pest control.
I wondered a lot more a few years later when I finally read "Silent Spring" and realized I had been part of the problem. Someone else would have done it if I didn't.
I use Neem oil, soap and water for my plants, and hand pull weeds, but that is for small scale cottage farming/home gardening. Overpopulation demands more and more food, that requires more and more insecticides and herbicides, more and more artificial fertilizers with high amounts of impurities and the diminished returns effect of all used more and more. Soils sterilized by the chemicals, surface and ground water unsafe from them, and chemists and genetic scientists trying for more chemicals and GM crops to keep up, and they just can't.
We are coming off a long plateau and heading toward decline in total food production as pollution builds to unknown toxicity. The soils can only take so much chemical abuse, and all the testing methods of the past and present, have not detected the various effects seen. Soil ruin and water ruin, were not seen, and neither were the 100 expanding estuary dead zones. Long term effects and chemical interactions could not be seen, no matter what animals were used in testing. The soils, the waterways, the groundwater, attached and overlapping species niches, and people, became the test animals and labs.
