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Plague of Rats Caused by Human Consumption of Snakes Central New Agency It's reported that residents of Changsha City, Hunan Province, China, consume 3,000 kilograms of wild snakes daily. This is viewed as one of the major reasons for the plague of rodents around Dongting Lake and other areas. According to the China TV station report, in Hunan Province the rats have traditionally been kept in check by their natural enemies; snakes, cats and hawks. However, cats are not catching the rats because the farm rats normally live along the shorelines of the in-land lakes. As for the hawks, though...

Mass murder of mice not enough Created: 2007-7-14 0:00:01 Author:Alice Gu ABOUT one million mice, up to 40 tons, have been poisoned to death in the past 20 days in the Dongting Lake area of central China's Hunan Province. However, authorities said the dead mice were not buried and their remains could be seen almost everywhere. Villagers from the 20 counties in the lake area have used everything from clubs and shovels to kill mice scurrying towards homes while others used fishing nets to stop the rats. However, people later realized mice poison might be the oldest but most efficient...

Click the following link: Two Billion Rats of Lake Dongting

Rats haunt central China cropland www.chinaview.cn 2005-06-17 22:51:48 CHANGSHA, June 17 (Xinhuanet) -- The rising water level in China's second largest freshwater Dongting Lake, in the central Hunan Province, since late May has driven a massive field rats migration from their living islets to the southern cropland, bringing about the area's gravest rat crisis in the last ten years. The rats rampantly nibbled the roots and stems of the crops, making thousands of hectares of farmland useless. The climate in the Dongting basin is temperate and rainfall is plentiful. The alluvial plain around the lake makes it one of China's...

More than 600,000 people have been evacuated from around rain-swollen Dongting Lake in central China, which is threatening to burst its banks and engulf millions, official media said. At least 16 people have died and 27,000 homes have collapsed, the China Daily said Friday, giving the first official statistics on how badly the current flood crisis has already hit the region. More than 8.4 million people have been affected in the region, which has seen water levels in Dongting and the rivers which feed it surge above danger levels, the Ministry of Civil Affairs told the newspaper. Additionally, 415,000...

A state of emergency has been declared across China's central province of Hunan, where more than 10 million people are under threat from surging water levels in a huge lake, Red Cross officials said. "I have just been talking to our Chinese Red Cross colleagues in Hunan, and they say the provincial governor has declared a state of emergency for all Hunan," said France Hurtubise, an International Red Cross spokeswoman in Beijing, on Wednesday. Thousands of workers have been mobilised to shore up flood defences around Dongting Lake, which acts as a flood buffer for the Yangtze River. Around...