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Posted by tzury 6 days ago

How Alberta Eradicated Rats(worksinprogress.co)
206 points | 136 comments
dan353hehe 6 days ago|
> But it was easy to prove warfarin was safe: a pest control officer held a series of local meetings where he ate warfarin-treated rolled oats while discussing rat control.

Got to love those live demos. Eating rat poison in front of the audience to prove it is safe!

_whiteCaps_ 6 days ago|
The dose makes the poison. Warfarin is prescribed as a blood thinner for humans.
scotty79 6 days ago|||
Is it only the dose? I think I read somewhere that rodents are especially vulnerable to this substance for some genetic reason. To lazy to check again. Not to lazy to pronounce my ignorance in a comment. Oh my.
graeme 6 days ago|||
>Is it only the dose?

I think they meant, for humans, the dose makes the poison. We would have to eat a very large amount of warfarin to have trouble. Rats get hurt from a small amount.

Poison is dose dependent, but the actual dose dependency is different between species.

sandworm101 6 days ago||||
Metabolic rate. The canary doesnt die fast because it is genetically sensitive. It dies fast because a birds metabolic rate is like a firecracker compared to ours.
sokka_h2otribe 2 days ago||
This may not be true...

Some birds have incredible metabolic rates --> take for example a humming bird.

However if I were to assume a canary has twice the human metabolic rate, it isn't a very good sensor. So, the canary dies half as soon? But the canary isn't even about poisonous gas. I believe it's about explosive methane gas, as their gas lanterns would need to be extinguished if the canary died, or else the gas leak that killed the canary could explode.

So, yeah, anyway. I think your information on this example is wrong, please feel free to correct me

joseda-hg 6 days ago|||
I mean, however close we might treat them as, they're still fundamentally diferent animals

Since they can't throw up or burp, something that produces enough gas (More than a regular soda) could in theory kill a rat, but just make a human slightly inconvenienced, or on the same idea, you could wrap the poisson on an emetic agent to make it safer while not affecting the rat at all

linuxkernal 6 days ago|||
Poor guy, must of had so many complications
maxerickson 6 days ago|||
Warfarin is reversible with vitamin k. I suppose he was also getting a low dose per unit of body mass.
flakes 5 days ago|||
When we had mice in our house years ago, we tried for a few weeks setting poison bait in the garage to get rid of them. We could tell the mice were eating the bait, but there was still no end to the mice.

We then had a thought... what if the mice were also eating the dog food in the garage? The container lid for the dog food was not very strong (weak and flexible enough that a mouse could possibly squeeze in and out), and coincidentally, that dog food was also high in Vitamin K.

Once we got better sealed containers to store the dog food, it only took a few days before we started seeing delirious, sick mice running around aimlessly in plain day light. Shortly after that, we stopped seeing them entirely.

It's possible the dog food was not reversing the poison. Maybe with the dog food locked up they started eating more bait, or maybe it simply took longer than we expected for the poison kick in. But regardless, we definitely learned a valuable lesson about keeping the pet food well sealed!

slow_typist 5 days ago||
Just curious, you poisoned them once and no mice returned ever since? In my house I had mice during the cold/wet season. Attempts to get rid of the population by killing them were futile. (House is now free of mice though. I secured every single possibility to get in during the summer. I read some mice can get through gaps that are 1 cm or .4 inches wide.)
flakes 5 days ago|||
We did do a lot of work sealing the exterior of the home, as well as removal of bird feeders near the house itself. The poison likely wasn’t a silver bullet, but I recall it (along with removing any access to easy food) having the most dramatic impact overall.
firmretention 5 days ago|||
Yeah, without sealing entry points, they just keep coming. Not only can they can squeeze through tiny holes, they leave a trail of pheromones behind them letting other mice know where to come in. Mice infestations are awful. Hate the buggers.
slow_typist 5 days ago||
Ah I did not know the pheromone part. So it could be a completely unrelated clan that moves in next time.

In older houses it is nearly impossible to find all entries… they can climb, and will even enter through the roof.

firmretention 5 days ago||
Yup. My house is 50 years old and a townhome. I was killing 3-4 mice a week at one point! Got the entry points sealed and it's down to 2-3 a year. Will probably never get it down to zero because they can get in through my neighbors and find their way here somehow.
slow_typist 5 days ago||
My house has a newer adjacent part with its own roof, pretty isolated from the old house. But I had mice on both attics. Finding their way from one attic to the other was the easiest part. But I needed infrared camera surveillance to figure where they entered the building. From the footage it was pretty clear that they never stayed long in the new attic. They entered through the new building, climbed up to the attic, than traversed to the old attic where they probably did all kinds of mouse things including raising their offspring.
sandworm101 6 days ago|||
Was the guy secretly eating Special K cereal?
loloquwowndueo 6 days ago|||
*have had
jrflowers 6 days ago||
* would of
loloquwowndueo 5 days ago||
Your killing me, man
jrflowers 5 days ago||
Don’t take a fence
loloquwowndueo 5 days ago||
This thread totally made my day. Thanks!
beloch 6 days ago||
A correction:

"One mayor refused to cooperate because he thought the program was a distraction cooked up by the ruling United Conservative Party."

The UCP was established in 2017 and has no relation to the Social Credit Party that controlled Alberta's legislature during the time period being spoken of.

cmrdporcupine 6 days ago|
Saying "no relation" is almost stretching it a bit. I kinda give hats off to someone for the slipup. It's not the same legal entity but there's a continuous ideological (and even personal) connection going all the way back.

The way I see it ... Peter Lougheed through Getty and (arguably Stelmach era) was a bit of a brief interruption. His urban, pragmatic PCs pushed the older rural, evangelical Socreds out of power in the 70s.. but that populist movement just went briefly into a (vaguely) outsider status, organized through Alberta Report, etc got into Klein's cabinet, found a national voice in Preston Manning's Reform Party, and returned provincially via the Wildrose Party, and finally triumphally recaptured the province under the banner of the UCP

So not legally the same part, but frankly just really the same minus all the weird fixation on currencies, banks, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (... so far!)

All of this off topic from rats. (Maybe?)

mig39 6 days ago||
I live in Alberta. No rats here. Also the ticks here don't spread Lyme disease.
andy99 6 days ago||
Maybe I’m just lucky but I’ve lived in Ontario (in cities and the country) and have never seen a rat here. I know they exist but it’s not like we’re inundated by them. Maybe some specific businesses have problems with them, but it’s not something you see every day.

I also lived in Montreal and did see them there sometimes. This was always early morning when I was out running - did not see them in Toronto, Ottawa, etc under similar conditions.

Edit based on reading some other comments: I have seen lots of coyotes and foxes so maybe that explains fewer rats. I know Montreal has coyotes but I’ve never seen them there and where I was there were also squirrels everywhere suggesting fewer predators.

janderson215 6 days ago|||
Maybe the rats only speak French and avoid primarily English-speaking provinces.
kimos 6 days ago||||
I live in Ottawa and I watched a crow rip a dead brown rat apart in my front street this week. I don’t see them often but they’re here. (I swear I live in a nice neighbourhood)
firmretention 5 days ago||
I never really saw them until I started working around Vanier. Seen some huge colonies near dumpsters.
TheCycoONE 6 days ago||||
There are certainly rats in Hamilton and Toronto; and I had the misfortune of dealing with them in my home at one point. They ate through (or under) the crawl space, and they would eat through anything we tried to store food in.

Unlike the sibling though I couldn't claim a nice neighborhood, it was near a soy processing factory.

pigeons 6 days ago|||
You sure see them everyday in Metro Vancouver
kimos 6 days ago|||
I care about the Lyme more than the rats tbh. That is way more likely to fuck you up long term than anything a rat will bring in this day and age. We aren’t getting the black plague anymore.
Retric 6 days ago||
Around 7 people the US get the plague each year. Yes that’s low, but it’s low specially because measures actively keeping it low.

Which means understanding and maintaining these systems is still valuable as even if millions aren’t actively dying, that can change,

kimos 5 days ago||
Whereas tens of thousands contract Lyme, often in life altering infections. Lyme is a big deal. But yes, I agree, we can both aim to reduce new disease without letting old vectors for disease back in.
bluefirebrand 6 days ago|||
Albertan here too. Can confirm no rats

My friend got Lyme disease from a tick though so I can't agree with that part

jessewmc 6 days ago|||
A tick bite in alberta? diagnosed lyme? when? seems very unlikely - there are no recorded cases in the 30+ years of tracking of a case of lyme disease from a bite _in alberta_. All from exposure elsewhere

(not to say that alberta will stay that lucky forever)

bluefirebrand 6 days ago||
Possible she wasn't in Alberta when she got the tick bite, I'm not 100% certain. She may have been on a trip to Saskatchewan or something but she lives in Alberta and definitely was diagnosed with lyme disease from a tick bite.

Possible the bite happened elsewhere and just wasn't discovered until she got back home though. She does travel around a bit

cmrdporcupine 6 days ago|||
> the ticks here don't spread Lyme disease.

this is out of date information unfortunately. With warming climate, the black-legged tick has spread into Alberta and samples have been found with the Lyme disease bacterium.

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/tick-lyme-diseas...

sojournerc 6 days ago|||
They likely spread rocky mountain fever instead, if they are dog ticks like we have in Colorado.
dyauspitr 6 days ago|||
They don’t spread Lyme yet
dismalaf 6 days ago|||
From Alberta, never saw a rat in my life until visiting BC...

Gophers everywhere though.

virgil_disgr4ce 6 days ago||
The Freakonomics podcast did a series on rats and their relationship to cities and humans and talked about Alberta's approach—it was really fascinating, I'd recommend it: https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/sympathy-for-the-rat
grahamburger 6 days ago||
I learned all about this from Joe Pera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LEJSMm1qpM
shawnz 6 days ago|
See also this exploration from Strange Aeons: https://youtu.be/vMOMa-4D1yQ?si=t1uxfY1pEDh2a44Y
jp_sc 6 days ago||
One of the bonus features of the movie Ratatouille has a short video-game sequence about it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=-2xD9ShhMZU
johnsutor 6 days ago||
There was a Joe Pera episode where they made a musical about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LEJSMm1qpM.
staplung 6 days ago||
Tom Scott did a video a few years ago about New Zealand's attempt to eliminate rats by 2050.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcp1BfPUeOc

The program is actually called "Predator Free 2050" and also aims to eliminate possums and stoats. No mention is made of Uruk-hai, orcs, or Balrogs.

tokai 6 days ago|
>Uruk-hai, orcs, or Balrogs

Aren't they native?

dmbrThnYou 6 days ago|||
Had they not been so greedy mining for mithril, maybe there wouldn't have been Balrogs. Not sure if that makes Balrogs invasive.
whynotmaybe 6 days ago||
Aren't there only a few of them? Is a few invasive?

How does a balrog reproduce btw?

debo_ 6 days ago||
You see, when two Maia love each other very much...
bragr 6 days ago|||
Uruk-hai are GMO
stackedinserter 6 days ago||
So, even impossible things can be made possible if there's enough determination and political will.
forlorn_mammoth 6 days ago||
eliminate malaria from the continental US. Check.

eliminate smallpox. Check.

eliminate measles. Own goal.

thatoneengineer 6 days ago|||
Don't forget screwworms!

https://cr.usembassy.gov/sections-offices/aphis/screwworm-pr...

itintheory 6 days ago|||
Another own goal - eliminate screw worm from north america...
gbacon 6 days ago||
Is it your position that private pest control could not achieve the same or better result for at most the same cost?

Are you an economic calculation problem denier?

RetroTechie 4 days ago|||
It's possible even the strongest believers in privatized-everything-is-better can change their minds given time & enough examples of effective public sector.
stackedinserter 5 days ago|||
Can you keep going and generate more assumptions about me?
swader999 6 days ago|
We sure have a lot of gophers though. They are cuter but you should still treat them like rats, no touch or try to play with them. Lots of diseases...
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