RAT WAR BEGINS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 393, 4 June 1908, Page 4

RAT WAR BEGINS.

Great Campaign Opened at the London Docks.

To save £10,000,000 A year.

“One estimate of the damage done by rats during the couise of a year has produced a total of From exhaustive observations, however, which I have made throughout the country, I should place the figure at 000,000 or even The reports of my travellers show, in fact, that only two industries are really immune from these pests—those of the stonemason and the ironfounder.”

The above observation was made by Mr C. A. Furu, who, with his “rat exterminator” on April, and commenced a campaign to free the London and India docks at Tilbury fiom a veritable plague of rats. The damage done by rats at the docks is extraordinary. They gnaw through sacks of grain and spill the contents ; attack bales of paper, in which they tear ragged holes ; and rip gaps in consignments of cloth and other goods, rendering whole lengths of material entirely valueless. There are 27 sheds at the London and India docks, each of which stands upon an acre of ground. An old man named Lawrence, who for ten years endeavoured to check the increasing horde of rats by means of traps and various poisons, calculates that burrowing under the floors of each shed are at least 2000 rodents.

Upon the estimate, which is considered a conservative one, the rat population of the clock is 54,000. Experience has proved —so far as figures go—that each rat does damage to the extent of at least one farthing a day. Thus the rate at the docks are responsible for nearly worth of damage a day, or, in round figures, T3OOO a year. The remedy by which it is hoped to exterminate this rat army in a space of six months is not in the nature ol a poison. Potatoes are infected with a tasteless germ particularly deadly to rats and mice, and then placed in the “ rat runs.” The rats, after eating the potatoes, contract a wasting disease. This, in addition to proving fatal at the end of three or four days, is highly contagious to other rodents.