Have any of them ever lived where the wood rats were allowed to reproduce unmolested? Besides the increase in crash fatalities (human, not deer/pig/whatever) there are the disease vectors that have to be contended with. And the noble beasts of the forest coming to graze in the beautiful meadows that schools so graciously provide, thus allowing the kiddies the opportunity to get hooved/tusked when they go over to pet the pretty beast.
When I was a wee lad, my family's house was in what was then a rural setting. There were still farms in town, and my parents evicted a few cows from one of great-grandmother's pastures so we could build a house. Cousins half a mile down the road did the same. We didn't have "lawns" -- we had hay fields, which were cut twice a year by tractors with sickle bars, and the hay was baled and taken to a barn. We played in those fields every day, even crawling around in the tall grass playing Apache Indian sneaking up on the wagon train. Nobody ever got a tick.
Now the town is a 'burb, they've enacted an anti-hunting ordinance, the deer are proliferating, and I can hardly step outside without picking up a tick. And there's no more hay field -- many years ago, when the farmers disappeared, we bought a lawn tractor and started mowing the whole three acres like "lawn." (Scraggly lawn, but sort on lawn-ish, nonetheless.)
