78 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 



side of liberality that is to say, distribute in the 

 rat-holes more small doses of poison than you think 

 there are rats. It is slovenly, and besides being 

 useless, to put down a big lump of poison here and 

 there, with the idea that the rats will come and 

 share it amongst themselves. This is what happens : 

 a big rat comes upon a large portion of poison, and 

 feeds upon it, to the exclusion of would-be sharers 

 of the fatal feast, and dies, but not before he has 

 eaten several times as much as was necessary to 

 kill him. And so others must go short and live. 

 But when the poison is evenly and thickly dis- 

 tributed in small but sufficient portions, all the 

 rats thereabouts may get a taste, and having got 

 it, are likely to be unable to search for more. The 

 only case in which it is advisable to put down a 

 bumper dose in one spot is when you find a burrow 

 containing a tribe of ratlets, which, when they 

 begin to run out, are in the habit of using one 

 hole. 



I remember dressing a thick ivy-grown hedge, in 

 which I reckoned there were at least two hundred 

 rats. On one side there was wheat about a foot 

 high, which the rats looked like clearing ; they 

 nipped off the stems, fed on the joints, and left the 

 rest to waste. I took much time and trouble not 

 to leave a single hole undressed. And it paid me : 

 for they were the only strong colony of rats on 

 that farm, having been attracted by the holding 



