202 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



be noticeable only for their scarcity, and the rest of this bulle- 

 tin would be useful only to farmers who have rats in their 

 barns and fields. 



Rat Slaughter. 



However thorough we may be in evicting and starving rats 

 there always will be careless or indolent neighbors who will 

 furnish them food and good breeding places, and so perpetuate 

 and increase the species that we shall have to take care of the 

 overflow. Occasionally rats will get into a rat-proof building 

 through a door or window carelessly left open, and most 

 farmers have rats in their barns or outbuildings recurrently, or 

 constantly. Hence the necessity for continuous rat persecution 

 and destruction. A little rat catching now and then has no 

 appreciable effect. Rat slaughter is the only term that de- 

 scribes effective work. 



For centuries the rat has been under the ban. Every ex- 

 pedient and contrivance that the inventive genius of man 

 could devise for rat destruction has been utilized. It is not 

 probable, therefore, that any new methods will be found in this 

 bulletin, and if those here recommended have any merit, it will 

 be because of precise detailed directions based on practical 

 experience. 



Rat Trapping. 

 Effective traps rate high among the means of destroying 

 rats, and if used persistently and with judgment, in connection 

 with a proper safeguarding of food supplies, many a home or 

 farm may be cleared of rats by traps alone. An early ex- 

 perience convinced me of this. As a boy of fifteen, while 

 attending a country seminary, I lived one winter with my aged 

 grandparents on a small Massachusetts farm. They kept two 

 overgrown cats, which never caught a rat, and the house so 

 swarmed with the rodents that they sometimes disturbed our 

 slumber by running over our faces, and even ate a hole in my 

 bed. Henhouse, pigpen, woodshed, stable and barn all had 

 their quota of rats, both black and brown, for at that time the 

 black rat was still common in Massachusetts. An attempt to 

 catch a rat in a steel trap resulted in the capture of one of the 

 cats, so the cats were killed and a trapping, campaign com- 



