Why alberta has no rats

If any Alberta resident is found to have a pet rat, they will face steep fines from the government. When rats are found they are exterminated immediately.

This is how Alberta is able to keep their rat numbers as minimal as possible. One pair of rats can potentially lead to a colony of 15, rats in just one year! With the teachings that Napoleon Louis Poulin left for the Alberta government, rats never get the chance to establish a colony within the province. Any rat that is found is usually a hitchhiker or a border jumper and does not get the chance to actively breed or create an established colony.

Karen Wickerson, specialist with Alberta's Rat Control Program, said the province set up an email in which helps turn around a case faster than the RATS number. She added there may be an educational campaign coming in the spring to help Albertans better identify what rats look like.

For her, the difference between a waddling muskrat, and a scurrying rat is night and day — but she has daily practice identifying the critters that land in her inbox. It's unclear if the pandemic played a role in last year's rat sightings.

Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative. She's also a researcher with the Vancouver rat program. Byers said throughout the pandemic rats made headlines. The pests were seen in the daylight, reportedly on the move scouring the streets for scraps of food as more humans retreated indoors.

Rats are thought to have spread the Black Death in the Middle Ages, as they do other viruses today. Rats arrived in Canada in the 18th century, but geographical isolation kept the invaders from reaching Alberta for a solid two centuries, until the first signs of the rodents started to appear along the border with Saskatchewan after the end of World War II.

Calgary Herald , a division of Postmedia Network Inc. In Vietnam, for example, the creation of the Hanoi sewer system at the turn of the 20th century saw a boom in rat numbers; in response, in the French colonial government began paying a bounty for their carcasses—that is, until it realized locals were breeding them to cash in on the reward.

In Washington, D. Canadians may not have been as enterprising as the Vietnamese or as bloodily patriotic as the Americans, but they have been far more successful. The brown rat Rattus norvegicus thrives only among human settlements, so farms and towns became the battlefields for the fight against invasion in Alberta.

Mass chemical warfare cleansed the borderlands, with some 63, kilograms of arsenic powder blown across thousands of buildings. A infestation in the Medicine Hat landfill was a record-setter, with nearly rats eventually rooted out. Today, the provincial government focuses mostly on stories placed regularly in the Canadian media covering the success of the program, instead of the sneakiness of the rodent. Across the Pacific, another former colonial outpost is struggling with European invaders, at far greater cost.

New Zealand has had a rodent problem ever since the Maori brought the kiore, or Polynesian rat, with them in canoes in the 13th century. Merrill and his team once pitched in their own funds to fly a pet rat back to British Columbia rather than kill it. If our farmers had rats, wooden bins are destroyed in less than six months. Many Albertans have never actually seen a rat. Read more. Raccoons v Toronto: how 'trash pandas' conquered the city.