Posted By Les Conklin on Feb 27, 2015

William LeRoy

By William LeRoy

Nature is based upon intelligent design. This means that all living things have a role to play in the environment. It is a simple and unalterable fact, that if you remove one naturally occurring element (animal) from a functioning eco system, other elements (animals) will misalign, and very often to the determent of the entire system. Take the rattlesnake for example.

Rodents often carry ticks which, in turn, carry Lyme disease. If left untreated, this bacterial illness can cause serious neurological problems in humans.

Spread by ticks that infect hosts by feeding on their blood, Lyme disease is currently on the rise in the United States. Normally, Lyme disease is controlled through predators. Foxes and other mammals can help control it by eating small rodents. Yet rattlesnakes also play a crucial role.

In order to find out exactly how effective these creatures are at controlling Lyme disease, though, the scientists decided to see exactly how many rodents these snakes were consuming. By using published studies of timber rattler’s diets at four Eastern forest sites, the scientists were able to estimate how many small mammals the snakes consume. They then matched their estimates with information on the average number of ticks each small mammal carried. In the end, they found that each snake removed anywhere between 2,500 to 4,500 ticks from each site annually–that’s a huge benefit to humans.

“Diamondback Rattlesnake on Tom’s Thumb Trail” by Gary Wojton

The latest estimate of numbers of Americans diagnosed with Lyme disease each year is ten-fold higher than previous Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates currently published in the scientific literature. This will come as no big surprise to people with diffuse and even incapacitating symptoms diagnosed by their physicians as unexplained, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiomyopathy, depression and a host of other illnesses which

the allopathic community maintains have no known cause, and should be treated by suppressing the symptoms with pharmaceutical drugs. No mention is made of the thousands of patients whose treatment is delayed by misdiagnosis, or by refusal to consider the diagnosis, or by the mistaken belief that adequate treatment of symptomatic Lyme borreliosis consists of two to four weeks of oral antibiotics.

Lyme disease is a real entity, caused by one of a number of spirochete organisms in the Borrelia family, not all of which are tested by in the CDC-approved standard laboratory tests. Other infections may also be carried by the Ixodes tick which carries Lyme disease – Babesiosis, Ehrlichiosis, Anaplasmosis, and most recently reported rare cases of Powassan disease.

Lyme Disease Wound

You may be surprised to learn that Lyme disease is in Arizona although not yet endemic. It has been detected in the Hualapai Mountains since 2009. Cases have increased by over 150% in our state due to more sophisticated testing and physician educational programs. There can be no question that our Arizona rattlesnakes play the same role here as they do in other states, in terms of keeping the infected ticks (which reside in our rodent population) under control.

Snakes have been a source of fear for mankind since biblical times. Rattlesnakes strike for only two reasons: to eat (and they don’t eat people); and out of self-defense. They are not aggressive, and do not seek out confrontations with people. They are much more likely to slither out of harm’s way than to strike. Contrary to popular belief, humans are rarely bitten by rattlesnakes. According to Arizona Poison Centers, less than 1 percent of rattlesnake bites result in human deaths.  

I may be wrong but when most folks that live here in the foothills made the decision to move here, it had something to do with getting out of the city and closer to the beauty of the undisturbed Sonoran Desert. If you live here in the foothills your home is “in the desert” with all of its naturally occurring wild life. The beauty around us is fragile and has been designed to work perfectly absent human intervention. To respect the desert, I would submit that you first have to become educated about it. That starts with having an open mind and a willingness to accept the desert for what it is and learning how to adapt to it rather than fundamentally change it to suit your needs. Anyone can kill something. It takes another kind of person to preserve and protect our desert. The question is, when will we learn to let awareness, rather than fear or habit, dictate our actions?