DAMAGE TO FOOD SUPPLY BY MAMMALS 37 



county of Virginia from 1915 to 1917, $2OO,ooo. 1 According to Vor- 

 hies and Taylor, house rats and mice annually do damage to the ex- 

 tent of $200,000,000 in warehouses of the United States, while native 

 rodents do damage amounting to $300,000,000 to agriculture in the 

 western states annually. 2 Some students of the subject assert that the 

 damage done to food supplies in homes, stores and warehouses, by 

 tracking in filth from stables, etc., and mussing over the food, making 

 it unfit for food, is as great or greater than that caused by the actual 

 destruction of food. 



The brown house rat of Europe, now of world-wide distribution, 

 is characterized as the "most destructive animal in the world." The 

 total damage done by the vast horde of rats the world over has been 

 said to be greater than that wrought by all other noxious mammals. 

 That may be doubted, though it is certainly enough. The brown rat is 

 estimated by Lantz to do damage to the amount of $200,000,000 annu- 

 ally to property of one sort or another in the United States, much of 

 which is to human food. 3 As to abundance of rats, Forbush tells us 

 that 31,981 were killed in five years under supervision of the owner 

 of a 2OOO-acre farm in England, and it was estimated that 5000 more 

 were killed by workmen in threshing the grain; 38,000 were killed 

 on one Jamaican plantation in one year ;. 16,050 in one French slaugh- 

 ter house in one month ; 47,000 on two Georgia plantations in winter 

 and spring of one year; 278,000 in San Francisco in four months dur- 

 ing the campaign against bubonic plague, with probably 500,000 more 

 poisoned; 103,000 in Copenhagen in eighteen weeks; 711,797 in Stock- 

 holm in seven years; 12,000,000 in a plague in India, etc. He esti- 

 mates the annual damage by each rat at $1.82 (citing Surgeon Creel), 

 and the total damage to agriculture alone in several countries as fol- 

 lows: 4 Denmark, $3,000,000; Great Britain and Ireland, $73,000,000; 

 Germany, $50,000,000; France, $40,000,000. To this must be added 

 a wholly unknown amount of intangible damage, such as loss of rent 

 of rat-infested buildings, the cost of trapping, poisoning and other- 



1 Bell, Death to the rodents, Yearbook U. S. Dept. Agric. for 1920, pp. 421-438; 

 see also Yearbook for 1917, pp. 225-233. Taylor, U. S. Dept. Agric., Dept. Bull. No. 

 1227, p. i, 1924, 



* Vorhies and Taylor, U. S. Dept. Agric. Dept. Bull. No. 1091, 1922. Taylor and 

 Loftfield, Dept. Bull. No. 1227, 1924. 



3 Lantz, The house rat : The most destructive animal in the world, Yearbook U. S. 

 Dept. Agric. for 1917, pp. 237-251. Silver, How to get rid of rats, Farmers' Bull, No. 

 1302, 1923. 



4 Forbush, Rats and rat riddance, Massachusetts Board of Agric., Biological Bulle- 

 tin, No. i, 1915 (also 32d Ann. Rept.). 



