SYDNEY'S RATS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 206, 1 September 1936, Page 9

SYDNEY'S RATS.

EVER-PRESENT DANGER.

ESTIMATE OF 2,000,000. i WAR TO BE DECLARED? i (Prom Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, August 27. Our City Council has once more engaged in the discussion of the rat menace which may fairly be asserted as a persistent danger to the health and the prosperity of Sydney. Many people here have a vague idea that because the council employs a few permanent ratcatchers, therefore some systematic attempt is always being maintained to limit the number of the rate, and to keep them in their proper place. But this is quite a delusion.

The City Council rat-catchers take their daily and nightly toll of rats to ihe University or the public analyst and get the animals examined for traces of bubonic plague. Ever since the last disastrous visitation of plague these precautionary methods have been kept up; but they make no difference to the number of the rats, largely because that if. impossible without an elaborate and expensive plan of campaign.

The late Dr. J. S. Purdy, as Public Health Officer, paid a great deal of attention to this matter, and in a special report, lie told the council that the difficulty of exterminating rats is due to their extreme fecundity. "Each female rat may rear five litters a year with as many as eight young, and there might be 080 progeny from one pair of rats in a year," he said. As applied to Sydney, the result of this rapid rate of reproduction is that there are at the present time in and around this city a,t least as nijrtiy rats as human inhabitants. Ma' matter of fact there are, only 1,300.000 jteople in our metropolitan area, and the most probable estimate of the total rat population places it at elose oil .2,000,000.

Damage to Property. In numbers alone the rat is thus a formidable public enemy. Also, it is gifted, with, remarkable intelligence, alertness, cunning, and a very memory, and as it lia-s an insatiable appetite, its destructives is almost unlimited. Dr. Purdy's estimate that each rat in Sydney eats ™ tc c of various sorts to the value of at least id Tier day, which brings up the total i« Sydney « £1,300,000 for the year olie """ estimates its loss from rats to week regularly. And this firm sets i s hands to storing away rolls of clotli a, ' J f'.rs at 1 o'clock in the afternoon to save them from these ceaseless degratrouble is that the whole of the city underground is open countij for the fat,. The old Tank Strea , still runs under Sydney s grea . noj pin"' block—the area bounded by Street and Pitt Street, King Street.and Market Street-and its channel gnes all the rats from the harbour f.oiit I easy access into the heart of the <it>. Then the lower levels of the giound, under streets and - buildings, are honeycombed with channels for gas, and electric light, and along all these the rats find their way, thus foi citig a subterranean entry into shops and warehouses. The only effective way ot dealin" with this plague is to divide the citv into blocks to isolate them, and to attack the rats in each area by wholesale lethal methods—gassing and poisoning. This is the method adopted with considerable success during the plague scare of 1021. when the great "shopping block" mentioned above was successfully isolated and practically cleared of infection.

Within the last two months, the City Council has been approached by a firm of "rat exterminators" —Houghton and Bvrne—with a suggestion that the "block" system should be reintroduced, that all tenants should he induced -to co-operate with the city officials and that baiting and gassing on a large scale should be instituted, when all exits have been stopped, and preparations for a wholesale massacre are. complete. The City Council is hesitating on the score of expense, but one might well belief© from the figure- quoted above that it would be worth a good deal of money to get rid.-of our rate.