On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech war on rats

I live in New Zealand and spend some time in our back country deer stalking, trout fishing and exploring.

NZ uses about 80% of the worlds supply of 1080 poison[1] and our next trip is into one of the areas where it is dropped every few years. 1080 is a horrible thing and I hate what we do with it. It kills animals it wasn't meant for, it makes game unsafe to eat and it's not a pleasant way to go. However I love NZ because of what nature has given us here, and unfortunately the poison is currently the best tool we have to protect the birds that we have left. Trapping and hunting are useful tools but we have so much remote, inaccessible wilderness that it is not feasible on its own.

I would love to see more innovation in tools to control the rats, the possums, the stoats and other small mammals that NZ grew up without and doesn't know how to handle. I'm hoping that new technology coming from start ups like we have here will bring new ideas and techniques. A major challenge will be taking those ideas and adapting them to work reliably in remote and harsh conditions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080_usage_in_New_Zealand

This was an unexpectedly fascinating read. This blew my mind:

> Rats are responsible for about half of all bird and reptile extinctions on islands, according to Gregg Howald of the group Island Conservation.

I live in the LES of NYC, and will routinely see 50+ rats in a 10 block span. They have massive burrows through a local park, with ample opportunity to live and breed, and a constant supply of trash and food (sometimes left "for the birds.")

One small benefit is that they prove a consistent supply of food for the local park's hawks, which can regularly be seen feasting on them.

Here's a cool video of hunting dogs attacking a rat burrow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxQksEF2uso

On a related note, brown rats make excellent pets, just so long as you don't let them breed and have your own population problems. I guess it's no surprise they're as prolific as they are, when they're probably the smartest small mammal out there and incredibly resilient to just about everything at that. My own rats answer to names and can perform simple tricks, sort of miles ahead intellectually than any other animal their size. They're also very loving animals, once they get to know you.

I grew up in Alberta and can recall only the occasional bit of anti-rat propaganda. The province's status as a rat-free zone is something most natives of the province view as a curious, obscure fact. Most take it for granted. I can remember once viewing the rat-patrol as a vanity project, thinking that mice (which the province does have) were the same, only smaller. We also have gophers (Richardson’s ground squirrel), which are larger than rats and truly industrious tunnellers. I once thought that the province was kept rat-free with great ease and only as a minor boon for tourism, or some such nonsense. The only time I've seen rats in Alberta was in a zoology course where we conducted some basic experiments on them. Lab rats are white and well-looked after, almost like pets. They bear almost no resemblance to wild norwegian browns.

Then I travelled abroad and encountered real rats. They're dirty, disgusting, and bold. Alberta's gophers, outside of populated areas, are as bold as rats. They'll chew their way inside your pack to get at your lunch, and I've even had my lunch stolen from my hand because I unwittingly held a sandwich near the ground without paying attention to what was creeping up behind me! Gophers are a blight on farmers and horses can supposedly break their legs in their holes, although I suspect this is a rare occurence. However, they aren't vectors for disease and, in spite of all the damage they cause, don't make your skin crawl the way rats do. Some people (tourists usually) deliberately feed gophers. Japan even had a brief gopher craze where they bought them as pets (it's illegal to export pests, so nobody here was able to cash in on that craze). Gophers are also substantially shier in populated areas and generally live outside in parks, not within homes.

Reading this article has reinforced my support for the rat-patrol. They're doing important work. I think I'll send them a thank-you.

This is incredible.

> * The Norway rat has a three-week gestation period and can produce five litters a year, each with four to eight offspring. In as few as three months, those rats can produce litters of their own. In theory, a single pair is capable of giving rise to thousands of progeny in under a year.*

> But then came the sealers, and they brought the rats, which devoured the birds: eating eggs, chicks, and even fully grown birds, Martin said, grabbing their necks and devouring their brains while still alive.

I can't even imagine seeing that.

I had not realized that there was anywhere in North America that was "rat free". Would love to make Sunnyvale rat free but with all the old orchards and what not I doubt that is feasible.

And the irony is that it's humans who are directly responsible for the rat scourge.

Genetically engineer them so that they don't act as disease vectors (those ones will out-compete the unmodified strains) and stick in a set of genes that allows use to use a very specific poison that will only kill the rats and nothing else. Put the poison in or near the food sources we don't want them to get in to and then let them be our little garbage men for the rest of time.

Would it be possible to do what they've done with mosquitoes and engineer male rats that will mate with females but not create viable offspring?

I'm unclear why _humanity_ (i.e., the quality of being humane) would be at war with rats, as it's kinda like multiplication being at war with apples, although I can see why _mankind_ (i.e., human beings) would.