36 



Rats and Mice 



is baited with any attractive stuff, such as old bones or a dead dog; 

 the shde is opened and the rats are allowed to regale themselves 

 freely for a time. Later the man who is to work the trap secretes 

 himself ; when he judges that enough rats have entered the en- 

 closure he releases the cord controlling the sliding door. The operator 

 and his comrades then hurry to the trap and scare the rats by 

 beating its sides ; the rats, unable to climb or jump out, soon 

 discover the funnel and pass through it into the sack. When the 

 sack is full a board is dropped over the mouth of the funnel, and 

 the men beat the sack with shovels until all the rats within are 

 killed. With this trap the inventors caught upwards of 5,000 rats 

 in a very short space of time. In trapping, however, far less 

 depends upon the trap than upon the trapper ; the good man will 

 take rats with the most primitive contrivances if put to it ; the 

 unskilful man will be unable to use the best. 



Large numbers of rats can be killed by means of men and dogs 

 towards the close of reaping, mowing, and threshing operations, if 

 care has been taken to prevent the escape of the rats. In the case 

 of cornstacks this can easily be done by surrounding them with a 

 temporary fencing of rat-proof wire-netting placed at a distance, 

 sufficient to prevent the rats jumping over it from the stack. 



Many rats can also be killed in their runs and elsewhere at 

 night by the flash-light method ; thus they frequently come to the 

 outer surface of ricks at night. If a strong light be suddenly 

 flashed upon them, the rats are temporarily dazed, and they can be 

 whipped off to the ground, for dogs to deal with, by a man armed 

 with a long stick. 



If a general campaign against rats should be organized 

 throughout Britain, it should proceed on some such lines as the 

 following. The country should be divided into districts, each 

 having as far as possible water for its boundaries. Work in each 

 district should commence at the boundaries and proceed gradually 

 towards the centre ; the more the work is supplemented by 

 individual effort the more effective it will be ; and the full co- 

 operation of all landowners and farmers will be essential. 

 Systematic operations (poisoning, fumigation of burrows, etc.) 

 should commence immediately after the harvest, and they should 

 be continued into the spring, the ground being traversed more 

 than once if possible. Trapping, of course, should be done 

 throughout the year. With regard to labour, a correspondent 

 states that it takes one man to every 2,000 acres to conduct 



