No, by that logic, I understand why some people use pesticides to get rid of disease-carrying ticks from the lawn where their children and pets play daily.
>use pesticides to get rid of disease-carrying ticks
Unfortunately this solution is a bit like using a nuclear bomb to get rid of gang violence. It does indeed do that, but at the expense of destroying the entire beneficial insect community as well.
Generally pest species recover faster after catastrophe than beneficial species, so by eliminating all of the pest's competitors pesticides are sewing the seeds of future infestations.
A much better, less toxic, and longer-lasting solution would be to provide pest-eating insect predators with habitats. In nature balance is achieved by predator/prey interactions instead of razing the beneficial soil ecosystem[1] with poison.
To take just one example, ticks are naturally eaten by birds (eg chickens), and if productive bird species can be used this has the side effect of producing delicious chicken (vs surface water/aquifer pollution, soil degradation which necessitates fertilizers, and a proliferation of plastic "keep children and pets off this lawn for X hours" signs).
People's instinct to protect themselves from disease-carrying pest species is a good one. The solutions handed to them by the post-war chemical industry are not. Who coulda thunk that redirecting all our WWII chemical weapons output to fighting nature wasn't such a good idea after all?
By your response it looks like you assumed I thought using pesticides were a good idea. I only said I understood why people might choose to. It wasn't an endorsement.
