25 



households, the cost of maintaining a rat is greatly increased, and 

 if fed on beefsteak, young chickens or squabs, the cost would 

 be still greater. Hotel and restaurant keepers have esti- 

 mated So as' a conservative statement of the cost to them 

 of keeping a rat a year. In addition to this, the injury that 

 they do to property of other kinds is sometimes greater than 

 that done to food supplies. Estimates of the amounts of losses 

 from rats in foreign countries have been published. In Den- 

 mark they have been reported to amount to 15,000,000 francs, 

 or 83,000,000 yearly. In France the total losses from rats and 

 mice in 1904 were estimated at 200,000,000 francs, or nearly 

 S40,000,000. The German ^Ministry of Agriculture states that 

 through the agency of the rat the people of Germany suffer an 

 annual loss of at least 200,000,000 marks or $50,000,000. 



Sir James Crichton-Browne, of the English Incorporated 

 Society for the Destruction of ^'ermin, asserts that the damage 

 done by the rat to agriculture and rural communities alone in 

 Great Britain and Ireland equals £15,000,000, or about $73,000,- 

 000 per annum. This takes no account of the injury done in 

 towns or in connection with shipping.^ 



Professor Lantz estimates that the cities of the United States 

 lose 835,000,000 annually from the depredations of rats. He 

 says that if the number of rats supported by people of the 

 United States were equal only to the number of domestic 

 animals on the farms, the minimum cost of feeding them grain 

 would be upwards of 8100,000,000 a year. If we were to take 

 the estimate of Surgeon Creel, that the depredations of a rat 

 cost one-half cent each day, or $1.82 per year, and assume that 

 there are only as many rats in the country as there are people 

 (on the basis that the population of this country is now in 

 round numbers 100,000,000), the rat would cost the people of 

 the United States $182,000,000 a year. Any estimate of this 

 kind must be largely guesswork, but a great indirect tax is not 

 included in the above estimate, that is, the cost of the fight 

 against the rat. No account can be had of the enormous sum 

 paid for traps, poisons and rat catchers, the expense of fumi- 

 gating steamships and rat-proofing buildings. The loss of rents 

 is a serious item, as tenants are not infrequently driven out 



» Lantz, David E., U. S. Dept. Agri., Biol. Surv. Bull. 33, 1909, p. 19. 



