178 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



over 150 rats alive in a small grain rick. Many more were 

 killed and many escaped. A farmer killed more than 700 rats 

 by surrounding a rick with boards and attacking them Vvith a 

 dog.^ * 



Buckland says that an official report from the French gov- 

 ernment asserts that the proprietor of a slaughterhouse killed 

 16,050 rats in one month. 



Rats are very numerous in this country. In Maryland, in 

 1832 a farmer and his men and dogs killed 217 brown rats 

 from one stack of rye.^ At The Farm and Trades School at 

 Thompson's Island, in Boston Harbor, a farm of about one hun- 

 dred and fifty acres, in one day I counted over 800 rat burrows 

 in the fields and along the shores. This was after many rats 

 had been destroyed and a large number of holes closed. Later, 

 about 1,300 rat holes were found open and rats were numerous 

 also in som.e of the buildings. The pupils of the school pre- 

 viously had caught in traps about 200 rats a month. From 

 June 6 to August 13, 1913, 572 were caught, but this trapping 

 alone hardly kept down the natural increase. 



Professor Lantz states that a farmer at Grand River, Iowa, 

 had about 2,000 bushels of corn in three cribs, and that the 

 rats ate and destroyed about one-fourth of the corn. At that 

 time the farmer was poisoning and trapping rats, having killed 

 as many as 300 in two days. The rats ruined more than enough 

 corn to pay taxes on 400 acres of land.^ The Moline, Illinois 

 "Evening JNIail" of April 25, 1904, states that Mr. F. U. Mont- 

 gomery of Preemption, Mercer County, killed 3,435 rats on 

 his farm. Most of these were caught in traps, between INIarch 

 20 and April 20, 1904. In a letter written to Dr. C. Hart 

 Merriam by Mr. Alfred Chisholm of Savannah, it is asserted 

 that on two rice plantations in Georgia 47,000 rats were killed 

 during the v.inter and spring of one year.'* 



Practically all ships have rats, and their numbers increase 

 enormously, despite the cats which are kept on shipboard to 

 destroy them. The losses to ship stores and cargoes by rats 

 are tremendous. The British man-of-war "Valiant" had so 

 many rats aboard in 1776 that they destroyed more than 100 



» Rodwell, James, The Rat, 1858, pp. 151-156. 



2 Amer. Turf Reg., Vol. 3, Aug., 1832, p. 632. 



> Lantz, David E., U. S. Dept. Agr., Biol. Surv. Bull. 33, 1909, p. 20. 



* Ibid., p. 21. 



