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."
The rats are a comin’... LOL...
The Naval Air Warfare Center?
See the little critters, yuk.
Is any of this flooding due to the new dam and the master plan to generate electricity?
Damn if I know?
Oh, rats!
They’ll soon be appearing in your local Walmart as “Chicken Tenders” at a really great price.
Rats! I thought this story would be about some Democrat delegation visiting China.
obviously the rats aren’t obeying the One Rat policy
Coming soon to feed stores, super markets, and restaurants near you.
Maybe if they didn’t eat all their cats & rat terriers....
Ratatouille.
Rat Under Melamine.
Rat Inna Cardboard Bun.
Kentucky Fried Rat.
Welsh Ratbit.
ping
So much for the other threads about the looming worldwide food shortage.
The course of human history tells us that rats carry disease and present a health danger. As a trading partner with the United States, this could pose a health danger to us. After all they export all kinds of product to us, and we export lots of dollars in return. The products they export could be contaminated with disease or the poisons they used to kill the rats, the dollars we export to them are probably done so electronically and while those electronic transfers could be contaminated with trojans and viruses, I am sure they have stolen the software necessary to take care of any problems, as we know they do not usually pay for licensing or copyrights of American products. I say China today as trading partner is a greater threat to this country than it ever was when we isolated it as our Cold War enemy in the days of Mao.
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