Column About Rats, Food Deserts, Where People Are, Aren't
Posted
Gary Lyon-
RATS TO THE RESCUE Rats are very intelligent creatures and have a very sensitive sense of smell. The non-profit organization APOPO have trained rats to sniff out land mines. Their training begins when they are four weeks old. Their training takes 9 months. The rat is rewarded with a food morsel when it responds to the presence of TNT. The rat recruits must pass a rigorous final examine before graduating. They are put on a leash and have to detect all the mines placed in an area by their handler. I suspect that those who don’t graduate wish that they had graduated. Rats are considered a delicacy by many epicureans. An adult rat will weigh about 2 pounds, which is too light to detonate a pressure-activated mine. The rats wear a harness and with a long leash when they “work an area suspected of containing land mines.” The leash is held by their trainer to control their search pattern. A trained rat can clear (detect all buried land mines) an area of 2,100 square feet in 20 minutes. A technician with a land mine detector would need 1 to 4 days to complete the same task. FOOD DESERTS The Department of Agriculture has defined a food desert as a geographical area where 95 percent of the population has to travel more than 10 miles to buy groceries. Thanks to Wal-Mart there has been a significant increase in food deserts. Communities like Oriental and Wimsboro, North Carolina., and Fairfield, Alabama now have earned this dubious honor. The locally, family owned grocery stores in these communities had to close down when Wal-Mart came to their town several years ago. They could not compete with Wal-Mart. Recently, the executives of Wal-Mart decided to close stores that were not meeting their required profit margins. Now communities like Oriental, Wimsboro and Fairfield have lost more than just their easy access to food. Unemployment increased because jobs were lost. Towns and cities have to redo their budgets or reduce services due to the decrease in tax revenue. They all lost Wal-Marts’ corporate donations that supported community out-reach programs. WHERE PEOPLE ARE, AREN’T The Washington Post newspaper contributor C. Ingraham wrote an article about the population density in the United States. In his article he indicated that most people do not realized how vast the unpopulated areas are. He cites the statistic that 42 percent of the land is populated by only by 1 percent of the population. Most of this land is between the Mississippi River and California. None of the counties in this geographical area, with the exception of metropolitan cities, have more than eight people per square mile. Some have less than one person per square mile. The most densely populated is in the Bronx and Queens counties where 3.8 million people live. The least densely populated area is the Alaska-Yukon area. This area of 145,000 square miles has a population of 5,500 people.
