Abstract
MR. A. D. MIDDLETON has given some useful information for the control of the rabbit population of Great Britain (J. Min. Agric, 48, No. 2). He believes the best prospects for success depend upon better co-ordination of effort with county pest officers instead of individual efforts at control without cooperative schemes, but that it is unreasonable to commercialize it and to expect a profit from rabbit control. However, the high price of rabbits and the intensive efforts of gamekeepers and trappers appear to have reduced the rabbit to comparative scarcity over most parts of Great Britain, a position approaching that of the end of the War of 1914-18, when wild rabbits became very scarce. On the other hand, the position of the rat is still serious, and in some 'blitzed' centres and ports with bigger food stores than usual, conditions have encouraged its increase. In an article on rat control (Lancet, 1, No. 5, 1942), Mr. Eric Hardy directs attention to the value of asbestos and three-ply wood as rat-proofing materials when many usual materials are unobtainable. White arsenic is the most useful of the poisons permitted by the law. Attention is also directed to the need for using more traps-even ten times as many traps as rats-and to using unbaited traps, and the encouragement of those predatory enemies of rats in the countryside usually destroyed by game-preservation, namely, stoats, foxes, badgers, owls, herons, otters, buzzards and polecats. The Ministry of Food's Infestation Order 1941, which came into force in January, gives added power for compulsory control of rats and other warehouse vermin.
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Rodent Pests in War-time. Nature 149, 190–191 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/149190c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/149190c0