No. 4.] RATS AND RAT RIDDANCE. 183 



some writers have asserted that rats can and do kill full-grown 

 fowls. 



Rodwell avers that in a short time he lost by rats all his 

 rabbits, guinea pigs, pigeons, and a large " setting " hen and her 

 complement of eggs, and he mentions other instances where 

 full-grown fowls and ducks were believed to have been killed 

 and partially eaten by rats.^ 



Dr. Brehm says that Las Casas tells us that on the night of 

 June 26, 1816, the rats ate all the provisions in Napoleon's 

 house on St. Helena leaving him and his companions break- 

 fastless, for poultry keeping had been abandoned because rats 

 ate the fowls, even stealing them from their roosts in the trees.^ 

 I have doubted that it was possible for rats to kill full-grown 

 fowls, but recently have secured corroborative evidence from 

 poultrymen. Mr. C. H. Bradley, superintendent of The Farm 

 and Trades School at Thompson's Island, says that rats have 

 gnawed the flesh from living turkeys at the farm, attacking them 

 near the tail or eating out part of the breast. Some recovered, 

 others died, and he has lost hens in the same way. Miss 

 Florence E. Curtis writes from Whitman, Massachusetts, that 

 rats kill her hens by eating off their heads at night, and Brew- 

 ster and Dupuy assert that rats kill chickens, ducks, geese, 

 partridges and the like, overcoming them, in spite of their size, 

 by one deft bite through the neck.^ 



Mr. John B. King of Newbury port says that so long as rats 

 can get a plentiful supply of grain they will not touch the 

 poultry, but he says that his neighbor, Mr. Frank E. Silloway, 

 who raises partridge cochins, has lost ten hens and one cock, 

 averaging about eight pounds in weight, and that another 

 neighbor has lost several brahmas in the same way. The rat 

 usually gets the fowl by the head, and is thus enabled to hang 

 on until the bird is dead, or it bites it through the neck (some 

 old rats are very skillful at this); then the flesh on the head and 

 neck is commonly devoured first, or the brains are eaten out. 

 Mr. King says that at one time when he was breeding brown 

 leghorns and keeping his grain in a rat-proof box, he frequently 



1 Rodwell, James, The Rat, 185S, pp. 74, 76. 



2 Brehm, Alfred Edmund, Life of Animals, 1896, p. 334. 



' Dupuy, Wm. Atherton, and Brewster, Edwin Tenney, McClure's Magazine, May, 1910, Our 

 Duel with the Rat, p. 69. 



