Colder weather and the ongoing harvest are signals to button up buildings, businesses and residences to keep out rodents. Chris Bennett shares the destructive capacity of rats in detail from his interviews with a rodentologist known as the Rat Czar of New York City. It conjures images from the 13th century legacy of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Germany.
. . . any hole where a quarter fits, or even less, is a rat door and needs repair because rats’ rib cages operate like hinges; they’re compressible.” – Bobby Corrigan
Source: AgWeb, October 20, 2020. Link. Rats rack up to $20 billion in damages to the U.S. economy each year, all totaled. Coast to coast, rat presence is near-ubiquitous at some level on agriculture operations of all types, but beyond the propensity to eat, gnaw and burrow, most <of us> know very little about a rat’s phenomenal ability to thrive in all quarters.
Know thy enemy—especially one that has sex dozens of times per day.”
INSIGHTS: Rat control on farms and in city environments is packed with irony, because the best control is obvious, yet seldom practiced: Cut off the food supply.