RATS!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 250, 6 April 1944, Page 22

RATS!

(Written for "The Listener’ by

DR.

H. B.

TURBOTT

Director

of the Division of School Hygiene, Health Department)

ATS are on the increase, Business people, municipalities, and harbour authorities haven’t had the necessary time for sustained warfare against rats. The result is more rats. They are breeding fast. One pair

of rats has an average of five litters annually, of from five to nine rats each. In your town, you can reckon there will be one rat for every human inhabitant. As soon as rats are found, instinctively we want to kill them. This is a needed reaction, for rats, besides being wantonly destructive, are also a health hazard, Because of our quarantine control, plague has not bothered our country so far, neither has typhus, but rats do spread other troubles here, especially dysentery, food poisoning and intestinal parasites such as tapeworm, This initial desire of ours to kill any rat invader finds its outlet in trapping and poisoning. We get busy and set break-back traps, which are good, or lay down poison. Having caught a rat or two, we rest on our laurels until rats damage our business or home again, This intermittent way of dealing with rats brings us respite only. We have to become conscious of the rat as a longterm problem if we really want to win rat warfare. Trapping and poisoning are temporary expedients. Poisoning is tricky work, too, from two angles, the danger to others, and the mixing to secure potency. Barium carbonate is quite an effective rat poison, available in spite of the war, But some local authorities have had failures with it, not because there has been anything wrong with the poison, as they have thought and said, but only from incorrect mixing. In one city, for example, so much grease was mixed with the poison in making the baits for free distribution, that the poison was masked and rendered innocuous, You and I are the cause of prolificness of rats. We provide all a rat needs, a secure home and food. Long-term rat warfare entails breaking this security of home and cutting off his food supply. Outside the house or business premises scraps should be in metal bins with tight-fitting lids. Fowl runs and yards should be kept clean with no food or rubbish around. Loose materials, boxes, heaps of any kind need elimination. The best way to deny the rat home and food is to keep him out of buildings. This calls for rat proofing. You know well how the brown rat makes its home beneath floors, behind walls, and under enclosed bins and shelves. And how the black and roof rat lives in hollow walls, upper rooms and attics, or in undisturbed loose materials, or boxes or rubbish within buildings. Sometimes such piles are undisturbed for months or years. Accessible spaces and loose materials-these make our rat problem. Rat proofing of buildings is the solution. The wise plan is to begin right. It is troublesome to rat proof old buildings. Architects and builders should plan and build our houses and business premises to eliminate enclosed spaces. Where this is impossible, material impervious to rat gnawing should be used and installed in a rat proof manner. Rat proofing starves rats, deprives them of breeding places, and is the only road to long-term reduction of our rat population.