THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST RATS. T HE rat is to be destroyed.
He is too wicked, too expensive, too prolific, too dangerous, and he is to be put out of the way by all means and in as large numbers as possible. That is the substance of a resolution which was passed at a meeting held in the Whitehall Rooms of the Hotel Metropole on January 10th, when it was decided to form a National Society for the Destruction of 'Vermin, Sir Lauder Brunton to be president, with Sir James Crichton-Browne, Sir Patrick Manson, Surgeon-General A. F. Bradshaw, and Professor W. J. Simpson as vice- presidents, and Lord Avebury as treasurer. Certainly the new Society is already distinguished by its godfathers. Whether it will succeed in accomplishing what Sir James Crichton-Browne, who delivered an interesting address on the subject, seems to think is possible may be doubtful; but nothing but good can come of a serious , attempt to deal with a difficult problem. No thoroughly organised attempt of the kind has yet been made.
The rat's sins are manifold. The damage which he does in a year to crops, cargoes, stores, granaries, poultry and game, dairies and 'outhouses, foundations, walls, -and drainage cannot be calculated exactly, but it must be enormous. He is ubiquitous ; he swarms in fields; hedges, coverts, farmyards, cellars, sewers, docks, and ships ; he is clever in getting out of difficulties, extremely courageous, able to exist on almost any kind of food, and horribly prolific. It is impossible to check, though many people would accept, the calculation made by Herr Zuschlag, a Danish engineer, that there are more rats in Great Britain than there are men, women, and children, and that each rat costs the community a farthing a day for board and lodging. Forty million rats costing a farthing a day works out at the pretty figure of .R41,666 per day, or over fifteen million pounds per annum. Perhaps those figures may seem excessive, or even ridiculous ; but now and then it is possible to estimate the damage done in a small area of ground, and the amount may be prodigious. For instance, when the London County Council pulled down the buildings north of the Strand by Kiugsway and Aldwych it was found that Catherine Street, Drury Lane, and the neighbouring streets were infested by great troops of rats, which had done damage to the extent of £5,000. One of their achievements was to gnaw to pieces over seventeen hundred napkins behind the wains- cot of the bandstand of the Gaiety Restaurant, and another to remove and stack thirty or forty wine- and beer-bottles .to make comfortable sleeping-places. Those are merely instances of measurable pieces of destruction, or examples of cleverness and strength. Further, the numbers of rats in these islands are almost certainly fast increasing, as is often the case with animals who are not natives of the countries which they infest. For, of course, the common brown rat which we all know is not English. Nor is he, for that matter, Hanoverian, though he has borne that name. He is possibly Mon- golian in origin; but wherever he comes from, he did not cross into Europe until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when he invaded Russia and the Continent, and so came to these islands. Aud, like other invaders, his vitality is prodigious. When he came to England he killed out the "old English" black rat, which only survives now in small numbers in ports and docks, recruited by fresh arrivals from incoming ships, only to be killed down as fast as the brown rat pleases. It may be that this killing off of the black rat has been a benefit to the community ; for it has been proved beyond question that the black rat causes every year in India thousands of deaths as a carrier of bubonic plague, which he disseminates by means of the fleas which desert his dead carcase and propagate the plague bacillus in the blood of human beings. But, on the other hand, the material damage caused by the brown rat is incontestable, and he is. not exempt from the charge of carrying other diseases, such as typhoid fever. Lastly, his fertility is appalling. The female brown rat bears a litter of eleven to twenty young every six weeks, and a young doe can have a family at three months. The figures suggest a. pleasing problem in geometrical progression. Rats do not, fortunately, as a fact, increase at that formidable rate.; but they might do so if the effort made to destroy them were not perpetual. Sir Jan es Crichton-Browne in the course of his address enumerated some of the methods which are now employed, and others which he suggested might be employed,, towards exterminating, or at all events decimating, the rat's numbers. He began with the gun, the trap, the ferret, and the terrier ; and of course hundreds of thousands of rats are killed every year by those means. The gun, doubtless, kills fewest, for a cartridge to every rat would be an expensive business ; but the ferret and the terrier slay their thousands. More are killed by poison • but poison has its difficulties. For example, one of the best ways of killing off a large number of rats quickly is to scatter soaked grain in likely places for a week or so, and then to substitute strychnined corn. But to distribute sufficient poisoned grain to have any effect almost certainly would be to act illegally. There are other methods of poisoning which are easier ; there are certain preparations of phosphorus, for instance; but even with those it is not always possible to avoid poisoning other creatures, such as poultry or cats or dogs. No method has yet been discovered by which rats can be poisoned in sufficiently large numbers to approach extermination. Sir James Crichton-Browne referred to the Danysz virus system of poisoning, and that system opens, no doubt, an interesting field of speculation; but Sir James did not make it clear whether he had personal experience of its effects. The idea. of the Dauysz virus is that certain bacteria which are poisonous to rats alone can be cultivated and transferred to bait which the rats eat, eventually developing a disease from which they die. Sir James described this disease as being e from one rat to another. Has it really been established that such a contagious epidemic can be produced ? It would be extremely satisfactory if the disease produced were proved to be contagious, but is it not a fact that the Danysz virus system has not increased our knowledge of the possibilities of inoculating rats with disease much beyond what was found to be possible with the Liiffier system, which formed the subject of experiments some twenty years ago ? A more direct and immediate system of dealing with the rat pest is that of the Paris sewers. A naked electric wire is stretched about six inches above the ground, and on it are strung pieces of horseflesh. The rats paw at the wire, and are "eleetrocuted."
It. is not to be doubted that increased, organised, and, above all, intelligent effort would succeed in greatly reducing the number of these pestilent creatures. But, also without doubt, there are wrong and unintelligent ways of going to work. One of the wrong ways would be to offer a reward for rats' tails. When there are millions of rats killed in Great Britain every year without a reward being offered, it would be sheer waste of money to proclaim that such voluntary effort would in future be paid for. The mere expense of providing officials to count the tails and pay for them would be preposterous, and the avenues opened to fraud would be innumerable. As it is, there are plenty of sensible methods of dealing with the problem which have not yet been given a. fair trial. The farmers of a certain district, for instance, might combine in a cam- paign against rats which would clear the district completely, at all events for a time ; whereas at present, if one farmer works hard to get rid of his rats, his efforts may be unavailing because of the neglect of his neighbour. Again, gamekeepers and farmers alike might be induced by their employers or friends to protect, instead of destroying, the rat's natural enemies, the stoat and the weasel. At present gamekeepers kill stoats and weasels without mercy, not to speak of owls and kestrels, and the result is the multiplication of a far worse pest than stoat or weasel. Perhaps ihe Society for the Destruction of Vermin, indeed, might make their best beginning with farmers and gamekeepers. The town rats can be dealt with as the dock rats are already dealt with, only more effectually with increased effort. But it is in the country that the rat multiplies, and it is the country people who need educating on the rat problem. At present they are neglecting known remedies. A single stoat let loose in cornrick will clear the rick more safely, more cleanly, and more effectually than half-a-dozen bottles of poison. Doubtless it would be an excellent thin(' if a poison could be discovered which would destroy cleanly on a huge scale ; but it is foolish to sigh for the Abana and Pharpar of poison while a much simpler remedy lies close at hand.
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