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It was no surprise that as soon as the recent dog and cat deaths in North America were traced to a rat poison in pet food, the question of sabotage arose immediately: “Was Pet Food Deliberately Poisoned?” read the headline in one Canadian newspaper.

Whenever deaths involve chemical causes, people immediately speculate about a shadowy poisoner at work.

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Much as I appreciate an appropriate punishment — and the fascination of an elusive pet-hating psychopath — I suspect that blaming a lone killer is far too easy an answer. Instead, this latest encounter with contaminated food leads to a more complicated, and less comfortable, sense of the poisoners among us.

According to scientists at Cornell University, the cause of the pet deaths — fewer than 20 have been formally reported, although more than 1,000 have been self-reported on the Internet — was lethal levels of aminopterin in the food.

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Does that rule out the possibility of a deliberate poisoning? No. But I worry that the conspiracy theorists, those who persist in believing that poor, sad Anna Nicole Smith was murdered or that a crazy animal hater is automatically responsible for tainted food, divert us from the probable cause and the more serious issue. Pesticide contamination, not just in China but globally, occurs because we operate, deliberately, in a world of poisons.

We kill lots of animals — the ones we find annoying, destructive or unsafe. We regularly employ toxic substances against rats, insects, prairie dogs, coyotes and invasive fish, and yet we are shocked when those same lethal substances affect us.

We’ve been learning and forgetting this lesson almost since we began using industrial pesticides: in 1959, American consumers spun into panic upon learning that their Thanksgiving cranberries were contaminated with the weed killer aminotriazole; in 1962, Rachel Carson published her exposé on the wildlife deaths caused by the pesticide DDT; in 1984, consumers nationwide threw away their pancake mixes after learning they contained trace levels of a grain fumigant; in 1989, consumers were horrified after the pesticide Alar was discovered on apples in grocery stores.

While cases of acute toxicity are rare, accumulated research studies show that chronic pesticide exposure, not surprisingly, is less than healthy. In 2003, for instance, a federal study reported that a high level of exposure to agricultural pesticides raised the risks of some birth defects by 65 percent and increased the likelihood of a variety of diseases ranging from cancer to Parkinson’s. Suburban lawn chemicals have been associated with increased cancer risks in both people and domestic pets.

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