RATS AND RUBBISH.

Evening Star, Issue 20119, 8 March 1929, Page 3

RATS AND RUBBISH.

SO TUB EDITOR* Sir, —Residents in the vicinity of Forbury Park are constantly complaining about the rat menace—for menace it surely is when these loathsome pests overrun a district as they appear to be doing in the borough of St. Kilda just now. Trapping and poisoning are apparently only partly effective, if reports one hears are correct. Rats usually only overrun a clean and wellregulated community when suitable harbourages or breeding grounds provide shelter and sufficient offal for food within easy reach. The area adjacent to Forbury Park is reasonably clean and sanitary, if one may believe one’s own eyes. It is reasonable then to assume that the harbourage or breeding ground that fosters these abominable vermin is not in the residential area. It is, however, freely admitted by many people that open rubbish dumps in the lupins near the beach are helping to feed increasingly large families of rodents. It is unlawful, I believe, to permit rubbish to collect on residential property, and be a nuisance or a harbourage tor vermin, yet here wo have the controlling local authority responsible for the enforcement of the sanitary laws, itself openly breaking those laws by dumping rubbish Jess than a hundred yards away from the fringe of a thickly-populated area. Rubbish must be dumped somewhere, it will bo acknowledged; but it is both unreasonable and unsanitary to have a big dump right alongside a populous suburb like St. Kilda. Surely a more suitable site, farther away from the residential area, could be found Failing that steps should, in the writer’s view, bo taken to exterminate the rats that are apparently being encouraged by the present vilcsmelling dump, and more efficient moans employed to incinerate rubbish before it is deposited.—l am, etc., Assiduous. March 7.-