XV 

 THE RELATION OF MAMMALS TO FIRE HAZARD 



Fire chiefs and insurance adjusters agree that fires are not infre- 

 quently caused by the work of rodents, particularly the brown house 

 rat. In many cases this is suspected, but there are not lacking instances 

 in which the proof seems quite conclusive. Matches are often dipped in 

 paraffin by the manufacturers to protect the phosphorus, before being 

 placed on the market. Rats, attracted by the paraffin, carry the matches 

 under the floors or to their nests and there gnaw them. 1 In a London 

 museum was once exhibited a partly burned rat's nest in which the fire 

 was caused by the rat gnawing a match that it was working into the 

 nest, thus nearly setting fire to H.M.S. Revenge. A fire in the Sultan's 

 palace at Scutari, Asia Minor, some years ago, had a similar origin, and 

 there are many other known and a multitude of suspected instances. 



Fires in mills and warehouses, particularly cotton mills, are said to 

 have often resulted from spontaneous ignition of oily rags or waste 

 carried into the walls or beneath the floors by rats. In some instances 

 fires have been caused by the accidental ignition of gas from leaky lead 

 gas mains, the leaks being the result of gnawing by rats. Many other 

 leaks from the same cause have fortunately been discovered without 

 the gas having ignited, showing that this is a real fire hazard where 

 lead pipes are used in buildings to which rats have access. More numer- 

 ous still are fires caused by rats in gnawing the insulation from electric 

 light and power wires beneath floors and within partitions. The loss 

 from fires attributed to defective insulation of electric wires in the 

 United States has been estimated at $15,000,000 per annum, a great deal 

 of which may have been the work of rats and mice. 



As heaps of inflammable rubbish in non-fireproof buildings are every- 

 where recognized as a fire hazard, it is not at all impossible that fires in 

 country and mountain homes may have been caused by the nest-building 

 operations of wood rats, and especially the "pack rat" of the Rocky 

 Mountains. Dead timber, especially where there are accumulations of 

 the finer twigs and small branches, is a fire hazard in forest areas, as 



1 See Lantz, The brown rat in the United States, U. S. Biol. Surv. Bull. No. 33, 

 pp. 27-28, 1909. 



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