Plague of Rats.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XX, Issue 2075, 1 June 1887, Page 3

Plague of Rats.

An American contemporary describee a Norwegian rat which is now playing such havoc in New York, and is so big and so savage that an ordinary cat is no match for him. Most of the up town hotels maintain in their cellars a permancut staff of from a dozen to a hundred cats, but even the maximum of four-footed ratcatchers is sufficient to prevent the Norwegian monsters from penetrating to the rooms, and gnawing to pieces everything that they can put their incisora on. Dut worse remains to be told. The number of Norway rats living at free quarters in New York is computed to reach the amazing aggregate of cue billion. A six-storey building in the the upper part of New York was a few mouths ago condemned as unsafe, because one side of the structure bail dangerously settled. When the workmen who [lulled down the house reached the basement they found it literally paved with rats, and an cut ire day was occupied in drowning the noise-some pests by means of a hose and fire hydrant. It was then ascertained that the rats had so partinacioasly burrowed under the supports, in order to get at a provision warcliouse on the other side of the wall, that the lowermost courses of bricks had disintegrated, so that the wall above had ijegun to sink. The proprietor of a provision warehouse in South street. New York, testified that in the course of 48 hours the rats had eaten into a dozen boxes of cheese and lard, and bored innumerable holes in two or throe barrels full of cider, so that the cellar was iuundated with the fermented juice of the apple. The next day, shocking to relate, more than 100 rats, dead drunk from tippling cider, were found on the floor of the cellar.