THE DANGEROUS RAT.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVII, Issue 4957, 29 March 1926, Page 1

THE DANGEROUS RAT.

CAUSED THE DEATH OF MILLIONS.

GREAT WORKER OF DAMAGE.

Forty ‘million pounds’ worth of damage is done in England 1 every year by rats. There is, however, .an even more appalling feature of the plague.. The. astounding fact has just been revealed that sin’ce 1900 no fewer than 12,00'0,000 people in India have been killed by ra.ts.

■ they have killed thousands of people in Europe, including many of our soldiers, by carrying disease, - and plague among them. Trench fever, influenza epidemics, foot-and-mouth disease, swine fever, and dysentery .have been traced to rats, which breed at such an astounding rate that it will take ,the combined efforts of the world’s doctors and scientists, to exterminate them.

At the age of eight weeks a rat may have young, and there is nothing uncommon in ten at, a litter and six litters in a year. One authority states' that a pair of rats are theoretically capable of producing in five years 940,369,969,151 offspring.-

The most expert rat expert exterminator in England is Mr B. Lewis Phillips* the managing director‘of the London vermin-destroying firm, which' employs two hundred and thirty ex-' per,t ra.t catchers, and which, .last year, destroyed 6,000,000 of the rodents. We shall never get rid of the plague, in Mr Phillips* opinion, until, every ship that comes into port is examined. <