The result is that Alberta is a magical land where rats never destroy vegetable gardens and nobody gets diseased from rat droppings in their attic
In this episode of Everything Should Be Better, Tristin Hopper explains how Alberta fights, and wins, an unending war on rats. Watch the video above, or read the transcript below.
That’s not a typo: For nearly 70 years, the province of Alberta has officially been rat-free. Rats still get in, but they never survive long enough to breed. The result is that Alberta is a magical land where rats never destroy vegetable gardens, where nobody gets hantavirus from rat droppings in their attic and where houses never burn down because a rat chewed through the wiring.
Rats are not native to North America. Coming over from Europe, they began chewing their way into the continent around the time of the American Revolution, starting out from places like New York or Halifax. They chose the path of blood. Teams of armed men were mobilized to patrol a rat control zone on the border. Common citizens were enlisted to trap, poison and shoot rats wherever they could be found. Propaganda posters urged Albertans to give their rodent enemies no quarter. “KILL HIM!” reads this one from 1950.
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