7 reasons to love scavengers

Foxes remove rodents, and the Virginia opossums, Canada’s only marsupial, eat 4,000 ticks per week, according to the National Wildlife Foundation. Opossums have moved north, expanding their range into Canada, probably due to climate change. With ticks, and Lyme disease expanding here, opossum’s taste for ticks will be enough to convince most of you that they’re animals we want to have around.

“We leave food everywhere,” says Booth. “And they remove it. STAT. If it weren’t for them, cottage country would be a much smellier place.” The film looked at the role of pavement ants in removing food waste from city environments, and how they were as efficient, or more efficient than rats at gathering food garbage. “You may not love either, but we’re better off with more ants,” Booth says, since they don’t carry disease. Futhermore, another scavenger species, the fox, also helps control populations of rodents such as rats and mice, as well as rabbits, which can cause problems, particularly in cities.

“Scavengers are the underdogs of nature.” That’s what we heard from Allen Booth, the writer, researcher, and originator of the idea for the short documentary, Nature’s Cleanup Crew. “When I looked into it further, it seemed like the scientists said the same thing: they get no respect, and they are deserving of respect.”

They are not looking for a fight. Opossums can’t break into your house, they won’t dig into the ground. “They tend to be less of a hassle, than, say, raccoons, which are not a true scavenger,” says Booth. Racoons and bears are ominivores, he explains, and not true scavengers. “You don’t want an amateur scavenger. We want to discourage those,” he says. “Leave the scavenging to the pros like ants or vultures, who are evolved to do it. They do it in a way that doesn’t bother us—the true scavengers are not the ones that bother us.” Occasionally, he admits, they look scary. “But they’re not predators: biting you is not their thing,” he says. “They’d much prefer if you left them alone.”

If vultures weren’t around, cottage country would be a smellier, dirtier place. “Vultures guts neutralize bacteria,” explains Booth. “It’s super important—and gross—but their digestive system kills bacteria." This includes some disease-causing pathogens, that would otherwise get passed along the food chain. He explains that dogs would clean things up, but their turds would still pass on the bacteria. "So vultures have become important, important to humans. We filmed vultures in Ethiopia, but we could have done them in cottage country. They do the same thing there." Evan Buechley, a conservation biologist with HawkWatch International / Smithsonian says in the film that hunting, poisoning, and habitat loss have put many vulture species at risk. “It’s something that everybody should really worry about because as vultures decline we have evidence, growing evidence from around the world that human disease will increase...If you lose even one vulture species, there’s nothing that is going to be able to really replace that function of consuming that carcass, and removing the disease from the environment. So vulture conservation and vultures in ecosystems are extremely important.”

The main message of the film is that people should appreciate the role that scavengers have in ecosystems, the benefits they provide to humans, free of charge. The film concludes by saying, “While some may seem weird, or even disgusting, they make our cities cleaner. So maybe we should relax a little, and make space for them. We help ourselves when we let them live in peace.”

“Scavengers have to be smarter than predators,” says Booth. They probably see better. They can smell more acutely. “People often think of eagles as smart, but vultures are much smarter.”