hckrnws

Two important secrets are geography and recent occupation of the land. Rats (like sparrows) need to be around human garbage to thrive.

Alberta's population is highly concentrated in a central corridor that goes from Edmonton to Calgary. Around that there is very little population: the Rockies on the West, the Saskatchewan prairies on the East, the uninhabited Northwest Territories on the North and Montana on the South.

Besides that, the province was established in 1905 and had very few people until the oil boom in the 70s.

These 2 factors made it easy to start early and expand the extermination gradually. These days the wars are mostly outside of the province, to prevent the rats from coming back.

The only rats I've seen here are lab rats, grown under special license. I've had also the tiny field mice (actually it is a vole) in my backyard but they're very easy to catch: just keep the place clean and use a cheap trap once every 4 years.

So our big cities don't have rats but we have lots of sparrows, crows, hares, magpies, squirrels, hawks, coyotes, seagulls, etc... Sometimes we also have white tail deer and pelicans.

Oh, and we have almost no snakes or other reptiles, too! The only one I've seen is the gartner snake but here in Edmonton it is just a little bigger than an earthworm.

> The only one I've seen is the gartner snake but here in Edmonton it is just a little bigger than an earthworm.

That might just be because Edmonton has lots of enormous dew worms :)

There are bigger garter snakes around - I live just outside Edmonton and see them pretty frequently. I hear there are plenty of rattlesnakes in southern Alberta too.

>> we have almost no snakes

head south; between Calgary and the border there are lots of snakes, both population and species.

Should be possible for saskatchewan to do the same then. No reason BC can't either since they've got the rockies, and an ocean.

Ocean is not a win. It means large sea ports and hence an influx of new rats.

It's not the 18th century where rats traveled along guy ropes on to shore. Rats will travel in containers, but that's a problem for where the containers are opened as much as it is for the ports.

Rats still very much travel along mooring lines to and from ships.

If you go look at any modern port you will see that the ships have large discs on any line going to shore.

That disc is an anti rat measure. At least one ship I worked on got rats, and we had to deal with them before we left port. Other ships certainly wouldn’t go through the effort.

For sure. In my experience there are two places I can go in Victoria and be guaranteed to find rats—one is the harbour.

They say in Vancouver you're never more than 20 feet from a rat, anywhere you go. Probably true throughout most PNW cities.

I've lived in Bellingham (40 minutes south of Vancouver) for over ten years and have literally never seen a rat.

Am I A) blind, B) something about the city here prevents rats from settling, or secret option C) something else entirely?

I believe, as the parent comment alluded to, the rat patrol has established a substantial beachhead into SK. The front lines are now outside the province and pushing east.

I've wondered about BC though - outside the density of the lower mainland anyways.

I'm curious as to how many problems rats really cause in a modern city. I live in a lightly forested area and have once or twice had to scare various rodents out of the attic and patch up a small hole they made, but that's about the worst they've ever done to me. One time I turned on the porch light at night and saw a very long-tailed rat nonchalantly eating from the bird feeder, which was fun to watch.

A quick Google search suggests that there are millions of rats living in New York City and Los Angeles, but I don't recall hearing about any recent catastrophies they've caused. I guess it's possible they could someday transmit a new novel disease like bats did, so we probably don't wanna let their numbers get too high, but other than that, are they really hurting anything? I view them about the same as pigeons or moths; occasionally annoying, but not something to relentlessly eradicate.

> I'm curious as to how many problems rats really cause in a modern city.

For context, there is a lot of farmland in alberta. I think the reason for this is more to protect agriculture than city drewlers.

But also rats are icky.

a basic problem is their easy population explosion. As soon as you allow a sizable population of them to thrive, it becomes very hard to keep them in check in the places where you really don't want them. In my smallish european city, we have a few food courts. The outer doors are normally open/ajar in day time. I really really don't like seeing rats scurrying about under the benches and obstacles when I visit there to eat.

yes it's the agricultural impact, both real and perceived (most of Alberta's crops are export-bound).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthohantavirus

The risks rats pose are hugely overstated, including in this very thread. Most of the world has rats -- often enormous numbers -- but we have functioning agriculture, aren't dying of weird rat diseases, etc. Notably Alberta has the same mice problem as everywhere else, and mice are a much greater threat[1]. I live in Ontario -- a warmer, much hospitable, more populous place than Alberta -- and rats somehow present zero concern in my life, despite the absence of any real control initiatives.

This is all mostly just geographical and time happenstance that baked in a situation and norm. Rats actually aren't native to North America but were introduced with Europeans. They then slowly spread, and Alberta made the choice to stop rats before they took hold in the province. So they started at zero and that made efforts to stop them from taking hold easy if sustained, especially given the brutal winters and inhospitable geography for rats.

[1] - Elsewhere someone referenced hantavirus, yet the overwhelming percentage (basically 100%) of cases of that are from mice in living spaces. Mice like the deer mice that are found throughout Alberta.

Agreed. Rat populations have regulatory mechanisms that generally prevent them from overshooting with respect to the resources available in their environment.

>In my field, there’s an equation that best explains rat population size. Simplified, it states: Garbage in = rats out. When food is plentiful, there’s no check on growth. When the cycle of regular feeding has been broken, then rats will disperse, injure, kill and even consume one another.

Source: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/rat-control-in-urban-e...

Rat colonies are the exception, they usually live as "nuclear families", separated from each other. Walk 100m away from a metro station with trashcans containing a dozen of rats near the entrance, and you'll find rat families, not colonies.

However the damages they can cause when they settle inside our houses tend to let us think this is their default modus operandi, and as a consequence we tend to project an exterminatory mindset onto situations where they are not problematic–and I'd even add: situations where they are a necessity.

In particular, if you have a compost box, you'll have a rat family settle nearby, and you shouldn't obsess over it unless you have good reason to fear an invasion (it already happened or you have crops drying in a shed, or something like that).

Saying this as someone who both owned rats at some point and have a dachsund/pinscher who killed hundreds.

And another crowd, whose advice i tend to ignore - urbanite animal experts. The same crowd that in germany gaves us the go ahead for the reintroduction of the beaver, cause surely a terraforming animal that tends to flood valleys will not clash with a densely populated country, with tons of villages and towns in little valleys.

Well I was talking about urban rats. I used to live in a neighborhood where people would throw dishes out of their windows on a daily basis. Like clockwork, a rat family would settle nearby. What's best ? Having rats or meat miasmas ?

And no, fining people for this behavior isn't an option in a neighborhood with stolen bikes burnt every other day, drug dealing spots every 400m, squats, empty cash register lying on the ground, etc ...

Reward correct behaviour with free cooking/heating? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tyb_OOrU2o

I’d argue that NYC hasn’t done enough with rats for this reason. And indoor roaches and mice too for that matter.

As a New Yorker, it feels unsanitary at best, and psychologically jarring at worst, and I wish I wouldn’t have to deal with seeing rats scurrying around on a daily basis. But there’s been no tangible public health risk so far.

Hantavirus is probably the worst thing most people have to worry about; it's left behind in the feces and breathing it in while cleaning up a bunch of droppings is possible.

That, and they chew holes in things, occasionally electrical wiring. Not nearly as big a concern as the smell of an infested house, but still not a great thing to have.

They chew holes in everything, especially mice, from clothes to insulation, they just love to destroy anything resembling fibres

I remember reading about specific insulation chemistry a few years ago that apparently rodents love: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a21933466/does-your-car-ha...

> I view them about the same as pigeons or moths; occasionally annoying, but not something to relentlessly eradicate.

Moths? You gotta absolutely eradicate the fuck out of these before they destroy your clothing or your food.

Rats, well, you don't want them in residential areas [1], and you don't want their feces around food preparation areas like kitchen.

Pigeons, especially their poop, are a massive danger for historic buildings [2] - their poop, similar to acid rain in the 80s/90s, is acidic and erodes the substance. In addition, it is extremely nasty to clean up, you need to wear a full PPE suit - our OSHA equivalent has a dedicated guideline just how to protect yourself while cleaning up pigeon poop [3].

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/indi...

[2] https://www.kath.ch/medienspiegel/taubenkot-gefaehrdet-bausu...

[3] https://www.bgbau-medien.de/handlungshilfen_gb/daten/pdf/201...

That's why you don't listen to the government :) They'd have me wearing a space suit just to clean my bird cage

> They'd have me wearing a space suit just to clean my bird cage

This is about doing that commercially for a living. If all you do for 40 years of your career is cleaning bird cages, roofs and whatnot from bird droppings, wearing the space suit makes sense because otherwise you're pretty much not going to live to retirement. Lung cancer is a horrible and nasty way to go, and I know on this one what I'm talking about. On top of that come the pathogen infection risks with H1N1 being dangerous enough to send a young man of fine health into critical care [1].

And for what it's worth, of course no one can require you to do so - but you absolutely should be wearing at least an FFP2 mask if dealing with bird droppings or mineral based cat litter of your pets. Try it for once, your lungs will thank you - I certainly noticed the effect.

[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/canadian...

A friend of mine got Leptospirosis (Weil's disease) when fishing.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/leptospirosis/

I also think about this a lot. I think that after racism, sexism, ageism,… Speciesism will be another frontier that will transition us from considering entire classes of beings as being inferior, dangerous, disgusting, etc.. to mostly equal and equally worthy of life and protection, to the point of rendering the old ways of thinking into seeming barely believable.

There are many parallels between how we think about other species today and how we used to think about other races of humans in the past. Many myths about other races, sexes, etc. that are now both sad and laughable to think about parallel, the myths we still carry about other species.

For example, the rats’ role in spreading disease is now under question. I, personally, have been questioning it for a while, simply from knowing that almost any commercial kitchen has rats and/or mice present, yet not seeing any major disease outbreaks happening that can be attributed to it

From an urban farming perspective rats can be quite devastating to domestic animals. My partner keeps racing pigeons and we've seen rats take pidgeons down for food. I love rats, they have amazing personalities, but I don't love if they prey on my livestock and pets!

I learned about this from the excellent show Joe Pera Talks With You. Season 1, Episode 8: Joe Pera Talks To You About The Rat Wars of Alberta, Canada (1950 - Present Day)

Highly recommend it!

Thanks for the recommendation!

In my case, I learned about the existence of the rat wars of Alberta thanks to "Your friend the rat" in the Ratatouille DVD, back when those were still a thing.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72KsjWUCUJQ

Fascinating. Not far from Alberta, here in Victoria BC I see rats on a very regular basis. They're all over the place. I used to live in a neighbourhood called Fernwood and had serious issues with rats infiltrating all parts of my home and shed. They'd create nests in strange places out of any kind of fibre they could find. I must have seen one per month at least while walking or riding my bike around, skittering across the road or between gardens. One time I got to see a hawk swoop down and grab one as it ran down the sidewalk.

A couple months ago I saw one making some hilarious vertical hops trying to grab onto the siding of my neighbour's townhouse in broad daylight. The city is covered in them.

Alberta must have excellent border patrol

You would expect Victoria to have a shot at eradication given that it's on an island.

Unfortunately it's very hospitable to the vast majority of smaller animals since it doesn't get very cold on the south end of the island and there's a fair amount of food available. Rats live comfortably outside of cities here, and you'll find them out in the woods where they can eat insects, seeds, nuts, berries, etc for most/all of the year.

British Columbia has banned rat poison since around 2021. At least anecdotally, the impact on the local rat population has been exactly what you'd expect.

It's difficult to assess one way or the other, but the impact of poisons on rat-eating animals was bordering catastrophic in some areas. Farms using rat poison would often have dead raptors nearby, for example. Hopefully the predators not dying from poisoning will have its own effect on the rat population. It might not be as significant as poison, but it's better that we have healthy predator populations rather than eventually little or none.

Good luck, Victoria has a navy base!

Alberta's advantage is being landlocked (and not a natural habitat for rats). They managed to keep the rats that arrived at the ports from encroaching inland.

> Alberta must have excellent border patrol.

Part of it is that rat control is like engrained in us through school. There's a certain pride to it, hard to explain.

Growing up in AB, I really didn't conceptually understand what rats are like in other places. I can't think of another animal with that same ubiquitousness.

Having no exposure as a kid means I find them terribly terribly gross when I see them in other places - in a park in Mexico City a couple months ago I audibly jumped when I saw them rooting around in gardens. Probably something to be said about exposure therapy

I've lived in Saskatchewan my whole life where we don't have this law and I can't say I've seen a lot of rats in my life. Maybe if you work in unhygienic restaurant kitchens, or on a farm you might see them more. But in the city, it's not a thing I can ever remember encountering.

If you're in Saskatchewan and you see rats you call Alberta. They'll come by and get rid of them for you.

I laughed so so hard when Ratatouille came out and had this little extra feature on the DVD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-2xD9ShhMZU

Also another SK HNer checking in!

Been seeing them more frequently in Montreal, apparently the city banned some specific poisons used to control the population so we end up with fun videos like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/x5cnu6/sweet_old_...

You'll see vast numbers of rats any night in downtown Seattle or San Francisco.

I lived in both for more than a decade. I only remember seeing a mouse sized rat once in Seattle. Never saw one in SF.

I live in NYC now and see multiple on a daily basis. Exposure therapy helps, but barely. It still scares the shit out of me a few years in.

I'm also from Saskatchewan, cheers

    And it's a ho, hi
    Farmers bar your doors
    When you see the Jolly Roger
    on Regina's mighty shores

-30 reporting in

There are dozens of us!

I saw you all at the last Stamps v. RR game, wearing watermelons on your heads!

I grew up in Alberta, too. Intellectually, I knew what a rat was but I'd never seen one in my life. After school, I moved down to California and was leaving work late one night (Sunnyvale, CA) and saw this crazy thing walking along the curb near my car. It was like a really small cat, or a huge mouse, or a short weasel with a long tail. There I was, all alone in the parking lot in the middle of the night shouting at this rat, "Hey! You're a RAT!"

The rat was not concerned by this.

It was probably poisoned & couldn't give a damn about anything else.

>I can't think of another animal with that same ubiquitousness.

In Toronto, you have rats, Racoons, Canadian geese, and pigeons. An infestation almost everywhere downtown and throughout the city.

I've seen a rat in Toronto that I mistaken for a Raccoon, it was insane how big it was. A crowd of people waiting for the Subway started running for their lives as it ran toward them on the platform. There is a rat, Racoon, epidemic in Toronto. They are everywhere and I don't think there is an effort to try and control them. As a matter of fact, I think they may be protected by law since I have heard of people almost going to jail for trying to chase away Raccoons with a broom.

I also grew up in Alberta, and I never even saw a raw in my life until I visited Europe in my 20s.

MB has regular amounts of rats. My dad said he once saw one the size of a small cat in an old basement.

Recently in Banff and Jasper while my comment isn't about rats I found Banff's whole Jurrasic Park wilderness to be fascinating. Meaning there must be 30 to 60 miles of fencing blocking wildlife from entering the highway. To enter into the wilderness there you can park your car in state park parking lot, then step up a few stairs, open the locked gate and then go down a few stairs into the wilderness. For me (from Pennsylvania/Maryland) it had a definite Jurassic Park vibe.

A few comments to help:

>> To enter into the wilderness there you can park your car in state park parking lot,

we don't have states or state parks, but provinces and the parks you visited were federal.

Banff, and to a lesser extent Jasper, are pretty tame with respect to "wilderness" but this is mostly a good thing! There's lots of facilities and you can experience them without needing to go into the remote backcountry - but it's there if/when you want to.

There are also electrified crossings with no gates, which always freak me out a bit. They feel like a trap.

The more interesting part are the bridges where wildlife can cross safely above the highway.

https://arc-solutions.org/article/banff-bears-use-trans-cana...

I like the wildlife gates that you see in sections of Vancouver island. Although I did see a guy go through then unsuccessfully attempt to hold it open for his wife and baby. https://www.munckhof.com/product/one-way-wildlife-gates/

I declined a job in Calgary due to this ban. I've kept rats for 20 years, couldn't imagine moving to a province I couldn't have a pet rat in.

No fancy French restaurants in Calgary.

I've never in my life heard of an individual person being prosecuted for violating the ban keeping a few as a pet at home. It's not like there's an inter-provincial border inspection checkpoint at the AB border, or house to house searches.

Albertans will "rat" (pun-intended) each other out for stuff like this.

As the should. Ask Floridians if keeping a few snakes as pets is a big deal.

Just glue a bushy tail to them and call them squirrels

Why not just get a cat? Genuinely curious, not trying to poke fun. What makes rats good pets?

did you know about the ban in advance? Or was it a surprise when getting ready to move there? Or did the place disclose that during recruitment "FYI, no rats allowed"

I was aware, but the hiring manager thought I would be able to work from an office out of BC, however when it came down to it, in-person in Calgary was required, so I declined.

how is it enforced? what are the penalties?

There is a dedicated 'rat patrol' as well but for the most part it's a government phone number and then reliance on citizen reporting. Penalties are fines and destruction of the animal in question.

I personally saw a rat cavorting quite vivaciously on a pallet of dogfood in the Bonnie Doon K-Mart (in Edmonton, Alberta) in around 2002. I have no basis for any claims about whether said rat was in a committed sexual relationship so cannot make any assertions about whether it was part of a breeding population in Alberta. Perhaps "spontaneous generation" (see Middle Ages) is a thing! Admittedly, it might have been a hapax -- some bold and singular rat Magellan travelling the Earth on bulk food pallets. I dare not presume.

To staunch any other niggling, I am neither sure of the year nor whether that property was bearing the K-Mart branding at that time. It has also been a Zellers and a Target, if memory serves.

"Most people in Alberta had never been in contact with rats and did not know what they looked like or how to control them."

Uh 'Most'!?

What!? Amazing to think there was or is any place in earth except say Antarctica where rats were so few and far between that people didn't even know what they looked like.

Have none of them ever read Kenneth Grahame's children's book The Wind in the Willows and seen various drawings and depictions of Ratty?

Strikes me as gross exaggeration and hyperbole, even if they'd never seen a rat in real life (which is pretty hard to believe) then it's even harder to believe they'd never seen a photograph or drawing of one.

For obvious reasons I daren't venture here any further.

I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, and have never seen a rat in my life. I've seen plenty of mice, and I've seen a handful of rat traps, but I've never actually seen a rat.

And I grew up on a farm in the 90s, no TV, no video games. I was outside shooting pellet guns, catching snakes, feeding kittens, riding dirt bikes my whole childhood. No rats.

"I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan,… …outside shooting pellet guns, catching snakes, feeding kittens, riding dirt bikes my whole childhood. "

I had a similar outdoors childhood in a town of about 10k people in a mountainous area about 70 miles from the State's capital city. You can never explain to those who've not experienced growing up that way about how wonderful it is.

One exception however, catching snakes was a no-no for this reason: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_brown_snake (read the fine print about how venomous it is).

I accidentally stepped on one when I was about 14 and luckily I'm still here. I was running along a bush track and turned into a right-angle bend and the snake—which was out of sight round the bend—was sunning itself in the middle of the track and I couldn't pull up in time—and squish!

The snake shot off in one direction and I did the fastest back-flip in my life in the other direction. I was trembling with fright for about ten minutes after that.

"… No rats."

Perhaps you shouldn't advertise the fact that Saskatchewan is ratless as you might have an influx of migrants (of the human kind that is).

On second thoughts, the last time I was in Saskatchewan (over two decades ago) it was so cold I may as well have been in Antarctica.

Perhaps rats are smarter than we think. Being in 'Antarctica' is just a bit out of their comfort zone.

BTW, I used to keep white rats and mice as pets when I was a kid (they were fun, I used to leave their cage doors open so they could roam and they'd return after exploring).

So you'd see rats as a kid? Honestly I don't even know how big/scary they are. I feel like I'd find them frightening.

Only harmless Gardiner snakes here. My dad always hated em tho. His childhood house was infested with em.

There's mountain lions roaming the plains here and they are scary AF. I find them even scarier here because you can see them from a long ways away, and you can tell when they are stalking you. It's safer, because you can see em and they know you see em, but it's scary when it's following you from 500M away.

And yeah, it's extremely cold here. Cold here today. It gets colder here than in the Arctic some parts of winter. It's life threatening. There's a kind of fear of nature present with everyone for about 4 months every year, November - February.

In the US, northern Idaho and Montana are beautiful, people in the states are sleeping on that part of their country.

The best part about growing up on a farm was probably watching my dad wake up every day at 5 and work until sunset with no boss and only his own brain and braun.

Really made me a fiercely independent person.

This section of the linked article was in the context of the 1950s prior to the introduction of this invasive species of rat to Alberta. So, yes, at that point in time nobody had been exposed to them, because they didn't exist there.

I wasn't allowed to watch Muppet's Christmas Carol as an Albertan child due to the presence of Rizzo the Rat.

Why on earth not? What terrible horrors did your parents think would befall you if you watched Rizzo?

Except for fleeting glimpses I never watched the Muppet Show so Rizzo is only a name to me.

Also check my reply to nightowl_games about being cold. Reckon during one visit to Calgary I was even colder (damn freezing in fact). No wonder rats don't want to live in Alberta. :-)

I was being mostly facetious, I was absolutely allowed to watch that cinematic gem, and yes Alberta can get damn cold. I live farther north than Calgary and grew up even further north than that.

i grew up in alberta and i coupdnt tell you if a rodent i see on the coast is a mouse or a rat.

its definitely not a prarie dog or a chipmunk

What about cockroaches, especially the American species? Here on the other side of Pacific especially in summer months they drive me nuts.

If someone were to observe me waking down the street in the early evening they'd likely see me suddenly start jumping wildly around as if playing hopscotch. It's sort of a game to see how many I can squish during one trip.

Still live here. For the last 40 years. And haven't ever seen a rat. Now mice is a different story. Dont often see them running around but dang it, by the amount of mouse shite in my parked RV over winter, there are a ton of them. They poop EVERYWHERE.

Alberta is an example for the world and especially those knuckle heads down in Florida on how to deal with invasive species

Yes, Florida was unaware that other places dealt with pests effectively.

[dead]

I'm surprised they haven't yet switched to celebrating rats, no longer recognizing them as a pest /s

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/10/18/news/alberta-ucp...

Nice pseudo "news" reference; no possible bias there and not remotely related to this topic.

`Canada's National Observer (CNO) delivers vital reporting on the defining crisis of our time: climate change`

Fair point: https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/alberta-ucp-to-vote-on-celebrati...

lol, same author from the same org with paragraphs copied and pasted from the other source.

did u even read

https://www.unitedconservative.ca/wp-content/uploads/Resolut...

> POLICY RESOLUTION #12

https://www.desmog.com/2024/11/02/alberta-conservatives-pass...

> In approving the resolution, the UCP resolved to abandon the province’s net zero targets, remove the designation of CO2 as a pollutant, and further “recognize that CO2 is a foundational nutrient for all life on Earth.”

its pretty reasonable that rhe wild rose folks would want to end funding for the rat patrol. im surprised that they havent