No. 4.] RATS AND RAT RIDDANXE. 185 



breeding on the island. Many such instances have been noted 

 on islands in various parts of the world. The rat often becomes 

 the most serious pest of the game preserve and the zoological 

 park; it destroys not only the food of birds and mammals, but 

 the birds and their eggs and the young of mammals also. Many 

 a gamekeeper finds rats more destructive to his young birds 

 than hawks, owls, cats, foxes and all other so-called vermin put 

 together. 



Rat depredations are attributed often to other animals; the 

 skunk, weasel and mink are commonly blamed when the rat is 

 the culprit. The eggs and young of pheasants, bobwhites and 

 ducks are its common prey. Rats sometimes kill and eat young 

 pigs. 



Dr. Brehm says that rats sometimes eat holes into the bodies 

 of very fat swine, and that they eat the webs from between the 

 toes of closely penned geese. Gilbert White asserts that rats 

 ate away portions of the feet of an elephant in the London 

 Zoological Gardens while the creature slept. The rats were 

 destroyed and the elephant was put into a new house, where it 

 recovered, but Brehm says that Hagenbeck, the dealer in 

 animals, had three young African elephants killed by rats; the 

 rats attacked the soles of their feet and gnawed through them.^ 



This seems almost incredible, and it is always questionable 

 whether some of the birds and animals supposedly killed in the 

 night were not dead or dying before they were molested by the 

 rats. The boldness of rats, however, is well known. Craig 

 says that they will gnaw the feet of sleeping dogs and nibble 

 the hoofs of stabled horses.^ This is corroborated by Kane, and 

 recent instances of hoof gnawing are reported. 



Rats confer some slight benefit on man by killing and eating 

 rats, mice, some few insects, some carrion, offal and garbage 

 and a great deal of sewage, but the benefits derived from rats 

 are slight, indeed, compared with the injury that they do. 



Rats damage property in many ways. They cause the decay 

 of sills, floor timbers and floors by bringing up moist soil in 

 contact with them, thus making conditions favorable for tim- 

 ber-destroying ants. They injure the timbers of buildings by 



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

 - Craig, Hugh, The Animal Kingdom, 1897, Vol. 2, p. 689. 



