Alberta’s rat patrol has eyes everywhere. That’s why a young woman’s seemingly innocuous social-media post about her pet rat was turned over to provincial officials who then had to give her some sad news: the domesticated vermin had to go.
The owner wasn’t in trouble, but she had a decision to make: Surrender the rat to be euthanized or find it a home outside of Alberta. So, in mid-March, the beady-eyed rodent was sent east to settle into a family member’s home in Saskatchewan.
Rejoice, Alberta. The province remains rat free – well, sort of.
That story was told to The Globe and Mail by Karen Wickerson, a rat and pest program specialist with Alberta Agriculture, who is on the front line of a war between the province and the vermin that has been going on for nearly 75 years. The province is winning, but only with unrelenting vigilance.
Pet rats, illegal in the province since the 1950s, really aren’t the issue. It’s the wild ones that hitch rides from other provinces and attempt to gain permanent residency that are a persistent nuisance. They do sneak into Alberta – there’s no stopping that – but what gives the province boasting rights is that there is no established rat population, explained Ms. Wickerson.
She said many Albertans are eager to report rat sightings, some of whom share stories of their parents and grandparents who took up the fight decades earlier. However, most reports, submitted in good faith, aren’t actually rats. She said about 50 per cent are muskrats. Then there are mice, gophers, voles and squirrels.
While the public submits the majority of reports, pest control inspectors hired and supervised by rural municipalities along the Alberta-Saskatchewan border perform most rat control measures.
The first official sighting of a Norway rat, or Rattus norvegicus, in Alberta took place in the summer of 1950 at a farm hugging the Saskatchewan border. Health officials spotted it by chance while researching the impact of a different type of pest – the sylvatic plague of Richardson’s ground squirrel. The Alberta government, worried rats would spread disease but also aware they could bite into the economy, transferred rat control responsibility to the agricultural department from health.
That’s when, long before the Oilers and Flames ever went head-to-head, the real Battle of Alberta began.
The small creatures were officially declared a pest that same year under Alberta’s Agricultural Pests Act, making it the responsibly of all Albertans to “destroy and prevent” rats from setting down roots. The problem was most people at that time couldn’t pick a rat out of a rodent lineup – and many still can’t. Even fewer knew what to do if they actually saw one.
On a cold day last December, a team of three from the Cypress County office in southeastern Alberta, armed with Ramex rat poison, checked for signs of rats at a local farmstead as part of their routine surveillance. They walked slowly around a silage pit, aging barn and grain bin, looking for rat droppings, burrows or chewed holes.
The group found nothing, which goes to show the program works, said Blaine Brost, a county councillor whose family has owned the land for more than a century.
“I’ve never, ever seen a rat,” he said. “Probably five years ago, my uncle came roaring down here and was all excited he found one. We all looked – it was a dead muskrat.”
Lisa Sulz, the county’s agricultural supervisor, said the last substantial standoff with rats took place about a decade ago at the local landfill. The vermin, believed to have arrived by train or transport truck, infested the garbage dump by the dozens and evaded capture for many months despite bait traps and the use of infrared digital cameras to track their movement.
Her colleagues joked that the only rat you’ll see in Cypress County nowadays is a taxidermied one in her office.
Back in the 1950s, preserved rats were distributed to agricultural offices to study, Saskatchewan officials helped train pest control inspectors and conferences on rat control were held in six eastern Alberta towns. Thousands of posters and pamphlets were also dispensed to railway stations, schools and post office staff.
Reminiscent of wartime ads, one poster said: “You can’t ignore the rat. He’s a menace to health, home, industry. He carries germs. He destroys property. He causes waste.” And, in large red font: “KILL HIM!” Another sign showed a mug shot of a rat with its top two incisors showing: “Unwanted unless dead!”
Alberta, at first, was no match for rats. The prolific breeders spread quickly along the province’s eastern border, spanning 270 kilometres by 1952, and they began inching west. There was also some public resistance and a handful of people were even convicted for aiding and abetting four-legged fugitives.
By 1960, infestations took a dramatic dip with only one to five cases per year. They remain rare to this day.
If you want to see a live one, you’ll need to go to Calgary where rats have staked a claim on local recycling plants. There’s no estimate as to how many there are but two things are for certain: rats are good at reproducing and they aren’t keen to leave these five-star resorts with all-you-can eat buffets of cardboard and plastic often soiled with leftover food scraps.
The situation is under control, said Ms. Wickerson, but the decades-long war rages on.
Alanna Smith