Today, rat control officers are the first line of defence along the border zone, aided by a strategic use of blood-thinning poison usually mixed with grain, says provincial agricultural inspector Robert Pulyk. More drastic measures are taken, though, should poison fail to eradicate rats infesting, for instance, a row of hay bales. In those cases, the farmer is called in to move the bales as rat control officers, armed with small-bore shotguns, fan out in a semi-circle. “If a rat comes out of a bale, they’ll shoot it,” says Pulyk. As the final bales are lifted they may be blazing away at as many as 20 fleeing rats. “The only good rat is a dead rat and it’s the last rat that you’ve got to get. None of them can get away.”
Alberta, thanks to its $500,000 annual anti-rat budget, is essentially rat-free, but there are chinks in the province’s armour. When a lone rat was discovered in late August, and terminated with extreme prejudice in a northwest Calgary neighbourhood, one might have assumed from local new reports that a public enemy on par with John Dillinger had met its end. “I have great confidence in our pest control people because they have years of experience,” a proud Premier Ed Stelmach told the Calgary Herald, “and they’ll get every rat that there is in the province.” Pulyk says the rat probably hitched into the province in a rail car or camper.
The battle for Alberta is a rare human victory against a worthy opponent. In cartoon terms, the rat is Road Runner writ large and hapless humans (with the possible exception of Albertans) are Wile E. Coyote—our laughable plans of destruction doomed to fail in the face of a superior being. This relationship is wonderfully captured by Toronto author Jerry Langton is his 2006 book, Rat: How the World’s Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top. In conversation, as in his book, Langton vacillates between revulsion and admiration for their adaptability and their survival skills. “People have often asked me about rat intelligence,” he says. “What people are describing as intelligence is really more alertness, which is advantageous for a prey species. And cunning, which is advantageous for a scavenger.” They have bad eyesight, but great hearing and a remarkable sense of smell. They have teeth harder that some grades of steel, so chewing into your home or compost container is no challenge. Langton, too, awaits a post-strike infestation in Toronto, for sheer force of numbers is their great advantage. It is mathematically possible for a three-year-old rat to have given birth to 43 litters of 516 rats. Add in children and multiple generations of grandchildren and she can be responsible for 16,000 offspring in a year, and up to 100,000 over three years, he calculates. “Truly, it is the animal we can’t get rid of, the only one capable of challenging human hegemony of the planet.”
It’s not for want of trying. We poison them and shoot them. There is even a sub-genre of urban American anglers who fish for rats in back alleys with conventional fishing tackle. We slander them in literature and in most every movie requiring an ick factor. There are nice things about rats, too. Lab rats—run through mazes, injected with drugs and otherwise tormented—yield many health benefits for humans, if not for rats. Hundreds of rats in Africa are trained to sniff out land mines. They make fine pets (though that’s illegal in Alberta). And a recent study in Baltimore found they are loyal to their neighbourhood. East Baltimore rats mix with their own kind, as do west-side rats, much the way city residents do. They communicate using high pitched sounds beyond human hearing, and even laugh, says Baltimore researcher Lynne C. Gardner-Santana. “It’s a good thing that nature did not afford rats with opposable thumbs,” she told a local newspaper. “I truly believe that rats, like cockroaches, could survive a nuclear holocaust.”
A case can be made that rats are no worse a pest than the rabbits overrunning the University of Victoria campus this fall. But bunnies are cute, and rats are rats. Langton wrote an entire rat book only to conclude he really can’t stand them. “Logically and analytically, I’m afraid of the disease they can spread. Viscerally, I’m afraid of their presence. They’re awful. They’re horrifying. Their teeth, their tails, ugh.” Even Siekanowicz, a professional, has rat issues. “I cannot tell you why but I don’t like them,” she says. “Maybe because they’re smarter than me sometimes.”
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