WAR ON RODENTS.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 461, 20 March 1909, Page 5

WAR ON RODENTS.

9 • ECONOMIC COST .OF THE RAT TRIbE. ihi Tii.iaiui'n—ritESs association—cap vttic nr.) London, March 18. Sir C. B. M'Laren, Liberal member for the Bosworth Division of Leicestershire, has introduced in the House of Commons a Bill to extirpate rats. He calculates that thero are forty million rats in Great Britain, which do annual damage to tho extent of £15,000,000. RATS AND PLAGUE. Sydney, March 19. The case of the man, who was employed rat-catching at Wearne's Goulburn Street flourmill (the scene of a plague outbreak), and who was subsequently taken ill at Newcastle, has been diagnosed as plague., A BAD CRIMINAL RECORD. In citing a contemporary's estimate of the annual damage done by rats in the United Kingdom—this estimate was ten millions, or five millions less than the cabled one—the "Evening Standard" offers instances of their de.structiveness "Their greatest record was established in a slaughterhouse near Paris, where rats in a single night picked to the bone the carcasses of thirty-five horses. There is verv little that they willnot eat; eggs, young birds, and animals are among the dainties which they snap up in tho ordinary course of business. But when pressed by hunger they will eat anything through which they can drive their terrible teeth. "They have devoured dead men in London mortuaries; they killed and partly ate an infant in a London' suburb a few vears ago. They have gnawed off the legs of living birds, and tunnelled a hen as she sat upon her eggs. Needless to say, rat will eat rat. "The idea that a trapped rat will bite off an imprisoned leg and so escape seems to be .jvrong; it is the other rats which do the biting. They eat the captive, and leave his leg becauso they caiinot get it out of the trap."