WHAT RATS COST.

Otago Witness, Issue 3830, 9 August 1927, Page 11

WHAT RATS COST.

AN EXTERMINATION CAMPAIGN-

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

SYDNEY, July 29. The plague scare in Brisbane has served to remind Sydney that it, in common with all other big cities, is not without its ever-growing army of rats, and that war against them is as essential as that against any other enemy of humanityDr Harvey Sutton, who is the chief custodian of the school children’s health in the metropolis of Sydney, as one of the officers of the Education Department estimates, that every rat costs the community 7s Gd a year, and adjures the public to make a front-line attack on the pest. He tells the public very plainly that rats exist because people keep them practically as pets, instead of treating them as pests; that the rats, in turn, keep fleas as pets; that the fleas, in their turn, maintain as pets millions of microbes, which, in due course, find work for the chemist, the doctor, and, alas, the undertaker, and the tombstone maker. The economic cost of each rat is probably a good deal more than 7s Gd. That is merely its board bill, so to speak. Several of the councils arc now having a clean-ing-up.