The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The Littlest Things
By Liam O'Leary
1) Don’t Underestimate Little Pests.
Carol spent most of this week’s episode of The Walking Dead chasing a rat that had snuck into her house after the Whisperers rampaged through Alexandria. She and Dog chased it through the garage/storehouse for two days, with Carol even smashing down a wall trying to catch it. It was actually kind of funny.
Of course, having an actual rat in your house is not funny. The little bastards scuttling around, gnawing on your stuff, leaving little “presents” for you everywhere, are about as far from fun as you’re going to get. The thing is: I’m talking about dealing with a rat in a world where you can’t call an exterminator and have it dealt with and then go out and replace whatever it ate. A zombie apocalypse is not such a world.
In a zombie apocalypse, rats are a huge problem. Where your food supply may be extremely limited or sporadic, having a rat (Or worse, a swarm of rats) eating your food is a disaster. You may not know when you’ll find or grow more food, so every bit of it is important. You can’t afford to have rodents eating you out of house and home. On top of that, rats are not the most sanitary of animals, and their droppings can contaminate whatever food they didn’t eat. Worse still, rats can carry fleas, which can carry the Black Plague, one of the worst diseases known to mankind; Sure, we can deal with it now, but this is in a world where the cure for it is readily available, something you may not be able to claim in a zombie apocalypse.
Rats aren’t the only such problem: Cockroaches are an equally virulent pest that can also eat your precious stores of food, contaminate them, and carry microbes capable of giving you deadly diseases like dysentery and polio.
It would be best if you took whatever steps you can to make sure that wherever you live, and especially wherever you store things, is free of these and other pestilent creatures because you can not afford to have them ruin the food you’re relying on to survive. They may be small, but they are dangerous.