Mice (AND RATS) And Men.
Mice and rats have been following humans since at least the origins of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago. It is easy to imagine we have probably been trying to kill them for nearly as long. More recently, however, we've been poisoning these pests, offering them tempting treats laced with deadly chemicals. Rats living in forests and other wild places are attracted to new foods in particular and so feed readily from such baits. Rats living with humans are not, at least not anymore. Present them with a new food and they will wait. Several authors have suggested that this "neophobia" in urban rats has evolved in response to the threat posed to rats and mice by our new "foods." For now, the little we know about the evolution of neophobia fits with this idea. The clearest evolutionary change in rats and mice as a result of our interference has been the evolution of resistance to the rat poison warfarin. We then created superwarfarin to target these resistant populations, but resistance to this poison has recently evolved (Mayumi et al., 2008). Once again our garden of neglect is seemingly growing out of our control.
