Photograph from Zuschlag 

 OFFICIALS RECEIVING RATS KILLED BY CHILDREN DURING A CAMPAIGN AGAINST 



THEM IN COPENHAGEN 



"By a small reward to the juvenile members of the family fur rats captured, the pests 

 may be kept down and the primitive joys of the chase experienced by the young trappers" 

 (see page 17). 



This gives a total of 200,000 men, with 

 their equipment, in this country, whose 

 economic output is devoted solely to feed- 

 ing and otherwise providing for rats. If 

 a small fraction of this army and the 

 money involved could be concentrated in 

 a continuous national campaign against 

 these pests a vast saving could be 

 achieved. 



By a nation-wide effort to increase rat- 

 proofing of structures, and to cause a 

 stricter guardianship of food products, 

 combined with the destruction of rats, the 

 number of these pests could be so greatly 

 diminished that the losses from this 

 source would soon be reduced one-half. 



Rats should be exterminated not only 

 to stop the tremendous losses of food 

 and other property, to which attention 

 has already been drawn, but in order to 

 protect humanity from some of its most 

 dreaded diseases. It has been conclu- 

 sively proved that these rodents are prac- 

 tically the sole distributors of the bu- 

 bonic plague which is communicated to 

 human beings from infected rats by 

 means of fleas. 



THEY SPREAD THE PLAGUE 



The history of the plague runs back 

 several centuries before the Christian 

 era. There Avere particularly deadly out- 

 breaks of it in Europe during the Middle 

 Ages. In the fourteenth century it killed 

 from two-thirds to three-fourths of the 

 population of several countries, and it 

 has been estimated that 25,000,000 people 

 died in Europe from this disease, which 

 was known as the "black death." Sir 

 James Crichton-Browne, president of the 

 Society for the Destruction of Vermin, 

 has recorded the fact that in 1907 2,000,- 

 000 deaths from the rat-borne plague oc- 

 curred in India. 



The bubonic plague appears to have 

 periods of quiescence, or what might be 

 called periods of incubation: but it is 

 possible that these periods of inactivity 

 may be due to the great reduction in the 

 rat population due to the disease. Sud- 

 denly it appears to become virulently 

 active and spreads with startling rapidity. 

 This accounts for its recurrence at Vary- 

 ills' intervals since the dawn of historv. 



13 



