MICE INVADE SHIPS

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 17, 14 October 1933, Page 18

MICE INVADE SHIPS

Ousting the Rats

Rats have been regarded as an integral part of every ship’s crew since the days when ships were first built. There are hundreds of stories of rats leaving sinking ships and giving warning it there is a fire below. And now the ship rat is being ousted from his recognised home by a small but persevering enemy, the mouse.

There are more mice than rats found in the merchant ships of to-day, a "Morning Post” representative learned recently at the headquarters of .Mr. Chapman, London’s busiest rat-catch-er. His offices comprise a veritable arsenal. Every sort of destructive device, ranging from elaborate traps to poison-gas, are the tools of his trade, and his work, and that of his assistants, is done in the dark hqjds of the ships, where the rodents live among every sort of cargo and travel to all the ports of the world. The process of “de-ratting” a ship to-day is long and difficult, although It Is nothing to the work Involved 50 years ago. At a recent, international confenance in Paris, a code was drawn up whereby a captain can present, nt any port in the world, a certificate which will show that his ship has been ’Mo-zsthtad.” or, alternatively, whereby

his ship will be inspected in the same manner in every port.

When a suspected ship arrives in London a “searcher” is sent by the Port of London Autiiority to explore every corner of the ship. If any dead rats or mice are discovered, they are at once sent to the nearest research station to be examined for traces of bubonic plague. If plague is suspected, the ship has to be taken out into midstream and evacuated. The cargo is transferred to barges, which have already been fumigated, and the ship is sealed, having previously been thoroughly “gassed.” Even the lifeboats in a ship are fumigated, and there is no corner which the rat-catchers, with their cans of hydrogen-Cyanide gas and their gasmasks, cannot penetrate. The result is that very few modern merchantmen cannot show a clean sheet at the end of a voyage.

The sudden recent appearance of mice is puzzling the rat-catchers. The mouse has never been a searfaring creature, and the reasons for his determination to oust his unpleasant cousin from the grain-holds in ships la fiometUng a£ a