Posted on 07/12/2007 7:15:07 PM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
For the past two weeks residents living around China's second largest lake have been able to smell a rat—make that two billion rats.
When the Yangtze River flooded on June 23, the water level rose in Dongting Lake, which sits along the river south of Wuhan in central China's Hunan Province.
The flooding began flushing out rat holes around the lake, triggering a literal rat race for higher ground.
Since then farming communities in more than 20 counties near Dongting have been overrun, observers say.
"For the past week, the situation has been very serious," Tan Lulu, who works for the international conservation group WWF, told National Geographic News from WWF's Hunan office in Changsha.
Farmers are using everything from poison to hammers—and even their bare hands—to kill the rodents, Lulu noted.
"There are so many rats that you can kill three of them with one [strike]," she said, adding that the banks of the lake are carpeted with dead rats.
Rat Poison
About two billion rodents have been coursing through the region, according to Chinese media reports, although it's not clear how this number was determined.
The rats have ravaged at least 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) of farmland by eating the roots and stems of crops, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.
In response, several news reports note, residents in the district of Dahu have killed more than 2.3 million rats—or 90 tons of the rodents—since the invasion began.
To combat the problem, local authorities have distributed rat poison in the affected areas.
Sanitation staff has also been dispatched to prevent disease outbreaks. In some places around Dongting Lake, 2-foot-tall (0.6-meter-tall) concrete walls have been hastily built to keep the rodents away from farms.
"The current focus is on educating the villagers in protecting themselves while killing the rats, and supervising the local health situation," Peng Zaizhi, director of the emergency control division of the Hunan provincial disease prevention and control center, told the China Daily.
Environmental Degradation
Dongting Lake is officially considered to be 1,058 square miles (2,740 square kilometers). But the lake is a flood basin of the Yangtze River, and its actual size fluctuates with seasonal rains.
Lulu, of the WWF, said a drought preceding the recent flooding exacerbated the rat problem.
"The drought exposed land that used to be the lake, and the rodents took up residence there," she said.
"When that land became submerged, the rats fled to higher ground."
The region has also been affected by the cutting and replanting of trees for two paper mills near the lake.
"Dongting Lake used to be a beautiful place," Lulu said, "but it has become very polluted."
A worker catches rats in central China's Hunan Province on June 23, 2007. The rodents were driven to higher ground and into farmers' fields after the lake flooded and submerged rat holes in the area.
To combat damage to crops and a potential public health risk, residents have been using everything from poison to hammers—and even their bare hands—to kill the rodents.
I bet rat tastes better than pork-soaked cardboard.
Maybe.
Perhaps they should spend more time breeding cats and less time eating them.
After the badger and squirrell stories, I’m surprised they’re not British.
Can you say...bubonic plague??
Give it a few weeks and we’ll find out.
>>>>”Two Billion” Rats Invade China Lake Towns
The DNC has a conference in China?
I remember back in the late seventies there was a rat infestation in Australia. At first, the local cats were in a frenzy catching mice. But it didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off, and the cats wouldn’t bother to get up if a rat ran right in front of them. It was like, “Why bother?”
Only if they count the Chicago “graveyard” voters.
Heh
Maybe we should send China back all the poisoned petfood & toothpaste so they can use it to poison the rats.
Looks like to me that the rats would be another source of protein, so instead of eating cats & dogs they can dine on stir fried rodents. Then again, maybe they can disguise the rats as chicken & export them to us. The FDA will never notice.
perhaps they can feed the rats some of their export food products, like toothpaste and fish. no more problem.
ah, I see we think alike, ha
~LOL!
What can be done to eliminate the problem, they should be gathered and burned, and to keep it from happening again? It sounds like it is too late for natural predators that wouldn't further upset the fragile ecology.
But I hope the waste from it doesn't end up in our food supply or other products we import from them. Or anybody else's.
Holy shiite, Ted the Swimmer times two billion? Perish the thought!
rat peiping
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.