Comment by beloch

I grew up in Alberta and can recall only the occasional bit of anti-rat propaganda. The province's status as a rat-free zone is something most natives of the province view as a curious, obscure fact. Most take it for granted. I can remember once viewing the rat-patrol as a vanity project, thinking that mice (which the province does have) were the same, only smaller. We also have gophers (Richardson’s ground squirrel), which are larger than rats and truly industrious tunnellers. I once thought that the province was kept rat-free with great ease and only as a minor boon for tourism, or some such nonsense. The only time I've seen rats in Alberta was in a zoology course where we conducted some basic experiments on them. Lab rats are white and well-looked after, almost like pets. They bear almost no resemblance to wild norwegian browns.

Then I travelled abroad and encountered real rats. They're dirty, disgusting, and bold. Alberta's gophers, outside of populated areas, are as bold as rats. They'll chew their way inside your pack to get at your lunch, and I've even had my lunch stolen from my hand because I unwittingly held a sandwich near the ground without paying attention to what was creeping up behind me! Gophers are a blight on farmers and horses can supposedly break their legs in their holes, although I suspect this is a rare occurence. However, they aren't vectors for disease and, in spite of all the damage they cause, don't make your skin crawl the way rats do. Some people (tourists usually) deliberately feed gophers. Japan even had a brief gopher craze where they bought them as pets (it's illegal to export pests, so nobody here was able to cash in on that craze). Gophers are also substantially shier in populated areas and generally live outside in parks, not within homes.

Reading this article has reinforced my support for the rat-patrol. They're doing important work. I think I'll send them a thank-you.