Gerbil Abortion Pills And
Other Out-Of-The-Box Thinking

I appreciate solutions to problems that most people would consider unconventional. One such example of recent out-of-the-box thinking concerns how forestry officials in western China are dealing with a plague of wild gerbils.

The gerbils have been a nuisance for sometime. In 2003, the officials installed hundreds of perches in the infested areas hoping that they would attract hungry owls and eagles.

Apparently, gerbils are like Ding-Dongs to predatory birds.

Unfortunately, that solution didn't work, so now the Chinese have concocted an abortion pill specifically designed for gerbils that they are scattering around the rodents' burrows.

I feel this solution qualifies as a good example of out-of-the-box thinking.

I'm not sure I would have thought of it. Of course, it doesn't help that I've never had a pet gerbil. Before I read this news story, it never even occurred to me that there could be such a thing as a wild gerbil. I figured their native habitat was PetCo.

Actually, according to Wikipedia, gerbils can be found wild in Africa, India and Asia, but the most popular variety sold by pet stores originates out of Mongolia.

If someone had asked me before I read about these officials in China -- "Brad, what are some unconventional ways you would get rid of a whole butt-load of gerbils" -- custom-designed abortion pills would probably not even have made my list.

I would have immediately thought of predators or poison or shooting them, but those are all rather conventional solutions. And I imagine you would have to be one heck of marksman to shoot a wild gerbil at 20 paces.

However, one out-of-the-box variation on the predator-theme that did occur to me involved cats or more specifically "The Cat" that is being blamed for killing that poor bloodhound down around Kennett.

Now, some people believe that whatever fatally injured the 125-pound dog was the work of a cougar or a mountain lion or some other "big cat," but I think those are unlikely culprits.

However, I'm not ruling out a cat, just thinking a lot smaller. What if a common house cat snacked on some meth it found being cooked out in the woods down in Dunklin County? Who knows what kind of freaked-out super kitty it would morph into, possibly one doped up enough to take on a dog ten times its own size, and win.

Just imagine if the Chinese released a few of these hopped-up house cats on this horde of gerbils. I bet the rodents would be history in short order.

Another unconventional solution that occurred to me requires building a giant combination Ferris wheel and roach motel, and parking it next to their burrows.

Considering the rodents' affinity for running around wheels -- granted, usually these are much smaller -- I figure it would be no time at all before the Chinese captured a whole bunch of these little critters in our scaled-up version that they could then ship off to some other country to be sold as "pets."

I also thought about all of the businesses that have childrens toys that they can no longer sell because the items contain too much lead according to U.S. law. Since the stores can't legally unload these items, why don't they crate up this toxic inventory and ship it back to China from where it likely originated? The Chinese could then literally dump these goods next to the gerbil burrows and let the rodents chew on them.

I'm thinking that since excessive lead exposure has been reported to cause reproductive problems with adult humans that maybe it would have the same effect on gerbils and benefit a whole lot of small U.S. businesses at the same time. It would be a two-fer.

Of course, unintended consequences could also occur.

Rather than thinning out the rodents, eating all that lead paint might instead result in creating a subspecies of extra-heavy gerbils that are also naturally impervious to radioactivity.

That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

Imagine if mankind ever has the apocalyptic nuclear war that has been prophesized for the last 60 years. We'll all be dead, but life on the planet will carry-on.

We can rest peacefully knowing that cockroaches and these gerbils will inherit the earth.

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I just realized that I never posted my Google Search Results for last week or today. I had dipped down to 274 last week on Google, but have rebounded to 336 this week. I don't know why.