Last May, a member of Alberta’s rat patrol paid a visit to a farm on the outskirts of Sibbald, a small town near the Saskatchewan border. He found holes bored into the foundation of a grain silo and feces littering the trash pit: telltale signs of a rat infestation, probably 100 strong. He scattered aquamarine pellets of poison, then returned with seven pest control officers, including Phil Merrill, head of the province’s rat patrol. Using a crane, they hoisted the granary off its foundation, watching for anything scurrying out, one officer standing ready with a shotgun. All the rats were dead. The patrol stomped on the burrows, then burned the silo for good measure. It was a bit of a disappointment, Merrill said. A few years earlier, they’d gunned down 157 rats at a single farm.
Merrill was swigging chocolate milk and recounting stories of past infestations as we drove toward the control zone, a sparsely populated buffer between Alberta, the largest inhabited rat-free region on Earth, and the rest of the infested planet. There was the rat in an Air Canada cockpit (chased down the tarmac, killed) and the infestation at the dump (poisoned, monitored with night-vision cameras to be sure). Keeping the province rat-free requires constant vigilance, and every spring and fall, Merrill and his team patrol the zone.
Are banned from the province, but Alberta is especially alert for one species: the brown rat, also known as the wharf rat, sewer rat, and Norway rat. That last one is a bit of a misnomer: the species traces its origins to northern China and reached Europe only in the 18th century, where it scurried aboard ships and made landfall in North America around the time of the American Revolution. Fast, strong, and highly adaptable, it’s now present just about anywhere humans live or visit.
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Alberta had the good luck of being one of the last places rats invaded, and in 1950, the government decided to keep them out rather than try to control them once they gained a foothold. The first and most important step was to teach Albertans — some of whom had never seen rats before — to fear and hate them. Preserved rat corpses were exhibited at schools and fairs, and the government printed World War II-style posters depicting a province besieged by rodent hordes. The message was clear: if the rats were to be kept out, all citizens had to do their part — fortifying their farms, reporting incursions, and if need be, taking up arms.
The campaign has been largely successful, and half a century on, Albertans remain vigilant. Merrill’s rat patrol has a hotline, 310-RATS, where people can report possible sightings. The hotline gets hundreds of calls a year, mostly false alarms — misidentified muskrats or pocket gophers. When Albertans do spot a rat, they often act quickly, beating it to death with bats or shovels before calling it in. They even report their neighbors for keeping pet rats, or fancy rats, as exterminators call them. Rats are rats, and Alberta’s government gives them no quarter. Sometimes the owners have their rats flown out of the province, but generally, Merrill said, We take care of them.
Alberta’s landscape makes eradication feasible. It’s sparsely populated, and its sprawling farms and small towns provide few structures where rats can shelter from the harsh winters. The 250, 000-square-mile province is protected by the Rocky Mountains in the west, frigid forests to the north, and badlands to the south. Accordingly, the government concentrates its efforts on a 400-mile-long strip on the eastern border with Saskatchewan.
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As the nine members of the patrol travel through the control zone, they check every building that might harbor a rat. They examine foundations for signs of gnawing, ask farmers if they’ve seen anything suspicious, and hand out buckets of poison pellets. Merrill, an energetic and affable 64-year-old who’s worked pest control since 1971, says that the key to catching a rat is to think like a rat: you want a granary, preferably an old wooden one; you want bales of barley or something with a bit of protein to snack on; and you want water. Each time Merrill clears a site, he marks it on a GPS map with a skull and crossbones.
We pulled up to a farmhouse, and Merrill knocked on the door. Rat patrol here, come to see if you’re harboring any rats, he called out. A gangly, weathered man in his 60s invited Merrill in, pulled out a chair, and the two swapped local rat gossip.
They discussed a dilapidated grain house just over the border in Saskatchewan. As a rule, rats stick close to home, rarely traveling more than a few hundred feet from their nest, but when things get too crowded, some venture out, running through the surrounding fields; most die, but a few find a new building and start to breed. Merrill reckoned there were hundreds of rats in the grain house, and the colony was sending rats out in a 5-mile radius. With the cooperation of the other province’s pest control officer, he wanted to poison it, maybe raze it completely. We’ve got to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here, he told me.
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The control zone is a buffer for Alberta, but now Merrill wanted a buffer for the buffer. How far can his rat campaign go, I asked him. Forever, he said. I know Alberta can do it. Saskatchewan has seen the vision and is two-thirds rat free already. Montana has very few rats; they could be rat free. Vancouver, New York, port cities would be more difficult, but eventually I think we can win there, too. I think the world — we’re winning. We’re going to win.
For thousands of years, people have devised all manner of traps to crush, poison, smother, and electrocute rats. We bred terriers to kill them, then used ferrets to flush them out of their holes. Bounties were offered, and parties were organized to club, shoot, and stab them. People tried feeding them wet plaster, hoping it’d harden and kill them (it didn’t). We tied tiny bells to them, hoping they’d scare other rats away (it didn’t). People sniped them from trees and gassed them in ships. In the 1960s,
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Declared all-out war on rats and armed teens with poison: 1, 000 teeners will spearhead assault on rats, read the declaration. War is on!
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So far, the war has been as futile as it’s been bloody. Rats thrive in the new ecosystems humans have made: they lurk in city infrastructure, eating our waste; they infiltrate farms, eating stores of food; and they hitchhike on global trade, devouring birds, turtles, and anything else they come across. Far from beating them back, we’ve helped rats spread to every continent except Antarctica.
The rat’s future looks bright. Trade is accelerating, and cities are expanding as their infrastructure decays. But in a few places, people are bringing new tactics and technology to the war on rats. Scientists, city planners, exterminators, engineers, pilots, and ordinary citizens are all enlisted in these new campaigns, which offer hope of finally pushing back the rat, at least for a while.
If there’s a constant in the history of rat control, it’s the sense that there must be a better way. An early 20th century Department of Agriculture report is florid in its despair: For centuries the animal has been banned, and human ingenuity has been taxed to the utmost to suppress it, wrote David E. Lantz. Everywhere the history of the contest is the same. Though thousands are killed, the relief is only temporary, and other thousands soon replace the slain. Therefore, if conducted along the old lines, the war promises to be never-ending.
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Chemicals developed in the middle of the 20th century raised hopes that perhaps technology could vanquish the rat. But rats are cautious — neophobic, is the technical term. They’re so wary of new things in their environment that experienced exterminators leave traps unset for days, letting rats become accustomed to eating from them. Modern anticoagulant poison is designed to be slow-acting, bursting the rodent’s capillaries days after ingestion, so that other rats won’t associate the bait with death.
The problem is that rats breed too quickly for poison to make much difference. The Norway rat has a three-week gestation period and can produce five litters a year, each with four to eight offspring. In as few as three months, those rats can produce litters of their own. In theory, a single pair is capable of giving rise to thousands of progeny in under a year.
So, we kill them as fast as we can. We kill rats because they eat our food and defecate in whatever they don’t eat. They once caused famines, though in modern agriculture they’ve been reduced to a nuisance — the FDA publishes limits of acceptable rodent filth per gram.
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We kill rats because they’re reservoirs of disease, including plague, which wiped out 60 percent of Europe’s population in the 14th
