57 
RATS. 
There is no single animal in the whole world which causes 
more loss and damage, and is the carrying source of more dis- 
ease than the rat. It is everywhere ; in every country ; in fields 
and dwellings, in the country and in the city, living in the 
ground, in bushes, in trees, in rocks, absolutely everywhere. 
There is no animal like it for vitality, prolificacy, persistency 
and cunning. It is frugivorous, carnivorous, granivorous, in 
fact omnivorous to an extent more than any other animal. It is 
not only what it eats ; it destroys, spoils and pollutes twenty 
times more — nothing comes amiss to it. It will carry off cloth- 
ing and curtains in a house to make its own bed, and it will 
make its nest in a wardrobe among the best clothes. If a house 
is left unoccupied for a few weeks, when the owners are on 
holiday, they may find their beds occupied by nests of rats 
when they return. The best leather harness will be chewed 
through, just as readily as the binding of the best books. It 
is a deadly pest to the young of all animals ; chickens and duck- 
lings are never safe from it no matter where they are kept. 
It will eat young pigs, and even attack young lambs. Young 
children left to sleep alone have been badly bitten by rats ; this 
has been a common occurrence. Grain-growing countries find 
it their worst pest. It destroys grain when newly planted, in 
the ear, when stored, when shipped in a ship's hold, on the 
wharf, at the railway depot. 
Here in Jamaica when sugar-cane was our most important 
crop, some estates paid as much as £300 to £400 a year for 
rat catching alone. Now sugar estates are almost safe from 
its attacks, thanks to the introduction of the mongoose. But 
for this and the throwing up of so many estates, rats finding 
their most convenient food scarce, would have swarmed every- 
where doing great damage to all other crops. Rats are still 
our worst enemy to poultry, to corn, and especially to coffee, 
and cocoa crops, the latter of which is of such growing impor- 
tance. Thousand of pounds are lost by damage to cocoa pods 
through rats now, but if we had no mongoose to check them, 
cocoa growers would have to spend as much as cane-growers 
did in the past, to save their crops ; yet no creature is more 
cursed than the mongoose, simply because it takes chickens 
which are wandering back from the domicile in the bush. The 
mongoose is a timid animal, easily kept in check, readily en- 
tering traps, hunting solely by day, and falling an easy prey to 
dogs. He is not responsible for more than a tenth part of the 
loss of young poultry that the rat is responsible for, and if it 
were not for him at present, poultry-rearing would be a much 
more difficult task than it is. 
