WAR ON THE RAT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3145, 24 March 1909, Page 3

WAR ON THE RAT.

CAMPAIGN IN ENGLAND. A recent cablegram from London stated that in the House of Commons, Sir Charles McLaren, calculating that there are forty million rats in Pritain, and that annually they do damage to the extent of £15,000,000 a year, introduced a Bill to provide for their extermination. The campaign which has for some years been carried on in Denmark, that most progressive of agricultural countries, against the common rat is at last, if Sir Charles McLaren's proposals are adopted, to be transplanted to British soil. Few have any clear idea of the enormous amount of injury caused by rats or of the extreme rapidity with which these small animals increase and multiply when not strenuously kept down. It has been calculated that, if all the young lived, a single pair would in years multiply to 646,000 rats. Fortunately, there are automatic checks upon the rate of increase, which prevent it froth ever being in practice attained. But even so, unless vigorous measures are .toktn against rats, j they increase to such a degree that they become a nuisance and a cause of heavy loss. Zuschalg, the Danish engineer, who led the rat-destruction movement in Denmark, estimates that each rat daily consumes one farthing's worth of food, and in the vast majority of instances that food is stolen from man's preserves. Now and again the rat does the work of the scavenger and consumes waste matter. But even when he does act thus, he incidentally causes great damage. Thus, in burrowing to get to the sewers rats will undermine pipes and drains, eat through brickwork, and produce subsidences in the streets and leaks in gas and water pipes. In the docks, or whenever edible, materials are stored in large quantities, tho human being is at his wit's end to know how to keep rats j down. Nothing seems to exclude them; they will make their way through concrete and work round shoet-iron interposed in their path. The damage inflicted by the rat in England alone is calculated at £15,000,000 annually, though this estimate is probably excessive. But whatever the exact figures may be, thero is no questioning the annoyance and danger caused by the rat. And, over, and abov> the material injury to buildings, crops and warehoused property, there is the risk of infection arising from the rat, for he is known to be the host of the parasite which produces the horrible disease of trichinosis l , and is largely con- ' corned in the spread of the plague-