Rendered at 12:20:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
dan353hehe 20 hours 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_ 19 hours ago [-]
The dose makes the poison. Warfarin is prescribed as a blood thinner for humans.
linuxkernal 16 hours ago [-]
Poor guy, must of had so many complications
maxerickson 11 hours ago [-]
Warfarin is reversible with vitamin k. I suppose he was also getting a low dose per unit of body mass.
flakes 7 hours 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 hours 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.)
firmretention 1 hours 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.
sandworm101 10 hours ago [-]
Was the guy secretly eating Special K cereal?
loloquwowndueo 14 hours ago [-]
*have had
jrflowers 8 hours ago [-]
* would of
loloquwowndueo 25 minutes ago [-]
Your killing me, man
scotty79 17 hours 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 16 hours 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.
16 hours ago [-]
joseda-hg 16 hours 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
15 hours ago [-]
sandworm101 10 hours 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.
beloch 14 hours 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 11 hours 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 21 hours ago [-]
I live in Alberta. No rats here. Also the ticks here don't spread Lyme disease.
andy99 13 hours 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 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe the rats only speak French and avoid primarily English-speaking provinces.
kimos 11 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
I never really saw them until I started working around Vanier. Seen some huge colonies near dumpsters.
TheCycoONE 9 hours 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 11 hours ago [-]
You sure see them everyday in Metro Vancouver
kimos 11 hours 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 9 hours 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 1 hours 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.
sojournerc 20 hours ago [-]
They likely spread rocky mountain fever instead, if they are dog ticks like we have in Colorado.
bluefirebrand 21 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours 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
10 hours ago [-]
dyauspitr 10 hours ago [-]
They don’t spread Lyme yet
dismalaf 16 hours ago [-]
From Alberta, never saw a rat in my life until visiting BC...
Gophers everywhere though.
cmrdporcupine 19 hours 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.
Lots of rodents in Alberta. The neighbourhood cats keep the mice and hantavirus down. Aircraft are often infested with mice. We need more bullsnakes.
triceratops 17 hours ago [-]
> The neighbourhood cats keep the mice and hantavirus down. Aircraft are often infested with mice
They aren't doing a good job of keeping them "down" if they're on planes.
cucumber3732842 11 hours ago [-]
Airports have tons of food (grass environment + human garbage), tons of mouse habitat (grassy areas, outbuildings, machinery), and not many cats.
sellmesoap 17 hours ago [-]
Time to flip the Samuel Jackson quote upside down, we need more mf'in snakes on the mf'in plane!
yawnxyz 21 hours ago [-]
> Author: Deena Mousa
clearly an article sponsored by Big Mouse
greazy 6 hours ago [-]
Clever joke. FYI Mousa is the Arabic pronunciation of Moses.
mcmoor 4 hours ago [-]
Anglicized Arabic I guess. In my spelling, it is Musa.
textmessage 7 hours ago [-]
Albertan here. Never seen a rat outside of a research lab. We do have mice though.
mekdoonggi 21 hours ago [-]
I wonder if we stopped trying to eradicate coyotes we might have an easier time with rats. I personally would rather see a coyote than a rat.
WalterBright 18 hours ago [-]
Around here the coyotes eat mice. I'll see a golf ball size blob of crushed bones and fur on the driveway now and then.
A few years ago, a coyote mom with her 5 pups set up shop on my front lawn. She'd keep a weather eye on me, and me on her, and we got along fine. Over the summer, the number of pups dwindled. I saw a severed head of one a ways away, I think it was done by an eagle. I think only 2 survived the summer.
I sometimes see 6 eagles at a time circling overhead. One flew by so close I could have touched its wingtip. Wow!
A bobcat lives nearby. I see his tracks in the snow, and saw him a couple times.
I live well within the Seattle metropolitan area. Isn't it amazing?
toast0 16 hours ago [-]
Over across the sound, we get bald eagles stealing salmon off of people's grills :)
b112 16 hours ago [-]
Nice try Bob. I know it's you, and I know you stole my salmon that one time.
Bald eagles indeed!
OptionOfT 20 hours ago [-]
This inevitably brings us to the story of the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone, and how they eat the deer which brings back a whole new slew of changes.
bragr 18 hours ago [-]
Not to be downer, but recent studies have not corroborated those effects.
>One of the most celebrated claims about Yellowstone’s wolves is facing a major challenge. Scientists say the study behind the famous trophic cascade story relied on flawed methods that overstated the ecological impact of wolf recovery. Their reanalysis found no evidence for a dramatic, park-wide surge in willow growth. Instead, the effects appear smaller and vary from place to place.
Is there a word for a popular misconception that nonetheless produces a positive result? The understanding by the public of the effects could be completely wrong, but the reintroduction of wolves and the restoration of Yellowstone are still good things.
lovemenot 14 hours ago [-]
propaganda?
gucci-on-fleek 8 hours ago [-]
There are tons of coyotes in Alberta, to the point where my very urban university has had to put up "Be Coyote Smart" signs since they keep showing up on campus. Nobody that I'm aware of is trying to eradicate coyotes here either, aside from the occasional farmer during calving season.
cmrdporcupine 19 hours ago [-]
Coyote populations are climbing, not shrinking.
mekdoonggi 18 hours ago [-]
I know, which makes our attempts at killing them even dumber.
jherskovic 12 hours ago [-]
Just give them all ACME catalogs and watch the problem solve itself.
cmrdporcupine 18 hours ago [-]
The problem is they've grown accustomed to urban environments, are way more fearless than they used to be.
I live rural (Ontario) and we hear but never see them. But if you go into town, they're a frequent occurrence. Grabbing people's pets and stuff.
If it was just foxes... fine. But coyotes can be a problem.
coryrc 12 hours ago [-]
Good. Outdoor cats are a bigger problem than a few native coyotes.
chasd00 6 hours ago [-]
I’m definitely pro coyote but they’ve been known to snatch a leashed small dog while on a walk in Texas exurbs.
cmrdporcupine 10 hours ago [-]
don't get me wrong, i'm on team coyote and i keep my cat indoors. i like to listen to them yip at night around here when they've cornered a rabbit or something
but i've seen stories/footage of people's dogs-on-leashes getting attacked and that's a bit scary
WalterBright 18 hours ago [-]
Once an owl sat on the porch railing, looking into the window. It was huge! What a magnificent sight.
hephaes7us 19 hours ago [-]
Farmers and pet-owners might prefer the rats.
sidewndr46 20 hours ago [-]
fox eat rats too
tweaktastic 21 hours ago [-]
Great read. I didn't know how exactly the rats were eradicated from Alberta something I have just heard and taken for granted. Reading the article provided a great overview of how much effort it really took to do it.
I would like to mention that, even though Alberta is rat free, we still have mice that can make your life misreble if they somehow enter your house/office.
cogman10 20 hours ago [-]
Here in Boise Idaho, we are watching the local governments completely fail. We've not had rats here until somewhat recently. The State, County, and cities have all taken a "not our problem" attitude to it and instead of putting in any sort of pest management/eradication programs they've basically just said "good luck everyone".
Hugsbox 22 hours ago [-]
Every so often I'll mention online that Alberta has no rats, and inevitably there will be an American responding in absolute disbelief saying I'm full of shit.
I may not live in Alberta, but luckily rats aren't really a thing in my neck of the woods. Travel an hour down the highway and it's a different story.
Also, as an aside, people often don't believe me when I say I've never seen a cockroach before in my life. Not a one. I've seen pictures of em, and I'm pretty sure if I saw one of those things irl I would absolutely shit myself.
skeeter2020 21 hours ago [-]
"Alberta has no rats" is a bit of a simplification, as the linked article goes into in depth. They do find rat investations (typically) in the border zones, and some sneak through, both wild and domesticated. Due to ongoing management though the statement is true in broad strokes. We have lots of mice and all sorts of ground squirrels (including a ridiculously awesome "museum") but thankfully very few rats.
Canada's shipping ports have had rat infestations for hundreds of years, even up the Great Lakes. DNA studies show that once a local population became established long ago, it defended itself repeatedly from incursions, and carries on. Alberta has no sea ports, so rats hitch rides there on trains, trucks, and in packaging. The scale is much, much smaller, so Alberta is somewhat able to eradicate them.
17 hours ago [-]
WalterBright 18 hours ago [-]
The exterminator told me you either have rats or mice. That's 'cuz the rats are good at eating the mice.
Hugsbox 18 hours ago [-]
In some parts of the world I bet that's true. I can say with a high degree of certainty that I have neither.
d_runs_far 21 hours ago [-]
I spent the first half of my life in Alberta; had never seen a rat nor a cockroach. I moved further east in the country, cockroaches in my first apartment the first week there... and then discovered rats near the waterfront within the month.
My dad and uncles lived near the southern border as kids, would hunt rats by the train station/grain elevator with a .22 back in the 50's & 60's.
paulmooreparks 5 hours ago [-]
I grew up in Florida, where you might come home and find a cockroach walking out of the bathroom with a towel around its head saying, "We need more toilet paper."
Okay, I kid, but it was almost that bad. We say there are no houses in Florida without cockroaches, just houses where they (mostly) aren't visible.
Now I live in Singapore, famous for being a clean city, and there are rats and cockroaches galore. Tropics, man....
drew870mitchell 21 hours ago [-]
Living in a warm climate US city i noticed roaches almost disappeared once off the first floor, i saw only one in five years in a 7th-floor apartment.
ipdashc 20 hours ago [-]
> I've seen pictures of em, and I'm pretty sure if I saw one of those things irl I would absolutely shit myself.
I always thought this was interesting (how many people are super scared of cockroaches). I'm absolutely terrified of bugs, I see cockroaches very rarely, and while I wouldn't pet one... They're not too bad? There's tons of bugs that are way scarier. Spiders, house centipedes, camel crickets. And that's just the stuff that actually exists near me. If I encountered an average Australian insect, good God, I'd run screaming. But cockroaches? Eh
I assume it's because cockroaches are associated with filth, and they tend to occur in large numbers. But as individual bugs, on the surface level they're not too bad. (Not "disagreeing" or anything, just think the different perspectives are neat)
rawgabbit 20 hours ago [-]
Spiders are beneficial. Please don’t kill them. Cock roaches do spread disease. I buy Combat Source Kill Max Roach Insect Killer Gel with fipronil.
I'm aware, I don't kill spiders if I can avoid it. And I know cockroaches are nastier. I just think it's surprising that people are so visually afraid of them, since they're not a very scary-looking bug.
rawgabbit 19 hours ago [-]
Growing up poor, cock roaches symbolize poverty and the run down sad places I used to live in. I can’t stand them as they bring back bad memories of my childhood.
ipdashc 17 hours ago [-]
That makes a lot of sense. I didn't think about it that way.
footy 15 hours ago [-]
Cockroaches make me uncomfortable, but I would not say I fear them. As a kid I was the designated person in the family to deal with all manner of bugs and just whatever.
Except for whatever reason, I am absolutely terrified of moths and butterflies. I don't want to be touched by either of those ever and I don't want them inside my house. I can appreciate butterflies are pretty and colourful and all that but I still don't want them to be near me.
FeteCommuniste 19 hours ago [-]
For me it's less fear than an instant "I must kill it / get it out of here" feeling. A big spider or centipede gives me a more intense "creepy crawly" shiver but a cockroach is way higher on the disgust scale for some reason.
ipdashc 17 hours ago [-]
That makes total sense actually!
SoftTalker 21 hours ago [-]
I live in a wooded, fairly rural area and I see cockroaches outside, under leaves, fallen branches, etc. but they don't really come into the house.
mordechai9000 19 hours ago [-]
Depending on where you live, those probably aren't the problematic species known as the German cockroach that typically infests human living quarters.
FeteCommuniste 19 hours ago [-]
The big ones (oriental, not German) unfortunately come into my house pretty regularly. Setting out poison helps but hasn't rid of us of all of them.
neonstatic 22 hours ago [-]
Re: cockroaches, I haven't seen them until my mid 30s, when I started traveling to warm countries.
sidewndr46 20 hours ago [-]
isn't it kind of moot? there are plenty of other rodents. They fill the gap left by rats. I'm not really sure eliminating all rodents would be a good idea for the ecosystem.
Hugsbox 20 hours ago [-]
Rats are, to my knowledge, more destructive and spread more disease. Obviously eliminating all rodents would be disastrous for the ecosystem, but rats in particular are an invasive species in North America so eliminating them specifically doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
tennfown 20 hours ago [-]
> Also, as an aside, people often don't believe me when I say I've never seen a cockroach
That one is pretty shocking. When I lived in South Carolina I remember I used to walk this one road late at night. Once it was dark enough I could see them scattering underneath the streetlights on the fucking sidewalk. Reminded me of sidewalk lizards in Florida, but grosser. I live in the Midwest now. I’m just glad they’re smaller here and don’t fly.
Hugsbox 17 hours ago [-]
I'm told that the nearest city to me "probably" has cockroaches, but I avoid the city like the plague so no roach encounters for me thus far. I'm 30 and have never left the Canadian Maritime provinces in my life, so I guess it makes sense that there's plenty of "normal" things I've never come across.
mc32 22 hours ago [-]
Don’t receive shipments of goods from out of province then. Vermin get transported in packaging easily.
llm_nerd 22 hours ago [-]
Alberta of course has rats. Short of being a hermit nation with impassable borders, the alternative is impossible.
But they maintain such a critically low number through aggressive, non-stop actions that we declare it "rat free", though that's a misnomer. Similar to the measles free status doesn't actually mean measles free, but rather that it isn't spreading uncontrolled.
Though as someone who lives in Ontario, I just wanted to add that I've never seen a vermin rat in my life in this province. Not in Toronto or its subways, not on its streets, nor in various other cities throughout the province. I've seen mice, of course, but never rats. I know they exist here, but someone having not experienced them doesn't mean much.
y2244 21 hours ago [-]
This bit made me laugh
But wild rats are rare. Albertans have grown so unaccustomed to rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of the 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats.
functionmouse 21 hours ago [-]
I bet most of those were rats
ddarolfi 21 hours ago [-]
I've seen plenty of rats in Toronto. I used to live around Chinatown and I could practically punt a rat just walking out my door at night.
freediddy 21 hours ago [-]
I lived in Chinatown in Toronto (College and Spadina) and I saw a rat the size of a cat running around the inside of a Chinese supermarket around 2am when I was walking around at night during my university years. I also saw smaller rats and roaches running around Chinese restaurants as well.
21 hours ago [-]
soperj 19 hours ago [-]
where in Toronto did you live?
Definitely not my experience. Lived at Spadina & Dundas.
rawgabbit 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dwd 6 hours ago [-]
The whole public buy-in is very much what is going on in Queensland, Australia right now that is attempting to eradicate fire ants. Even the funding fight to get the Commonwealth and neighbouring states to pitch in, as they have the potential to become endemic to the whole continent.
We also have a lot of "sovereign citizen" people pushing misinformation about the safety of the various chemicals used, attempting to deny inspectors onto properties, and general complaints about helicopter/drone dispersal in inaccessible areas and large farms/properties.
stackedinserter 21 hours ago [-]
So, even impossible things can be made possible if there's enough determination and political will.
gbacon 10 hours ago [-]
Is it your position that private pest control could not achieve the same or better result for at most the same cost?
Another own goal - eliminate screw worm from north america...
virgil_disgr4ce 22 hours 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
msukkarieh 18 hours ago [-]
there's no rats but there has been an uptick in voles and other rodents
also Alberta, Canada mentioned
15 hours ago [-]
tim333 18 hours ago [-]
I wonder if people could do bed bugs? Those are rather annoying.
We have online reporting for rat sightings that they take action on
conartist6 14 hours ago [-]
... ... all i learned is that eventually Alberta will have rats, and that nowhere else can ever replicate their success. Thank you, next
debo_ 20 hours ago [-]
Alberta has shown us that proper policy incentives can drive meaningful change. Instead of leaving rats to languish in cellars, they created incentives for them to do meaningful work in the provincial government instead.
verelo 20 hours ago [-]
The irony that they figured out how to eliminate rats, but can’t diversify from oil and gas is pretty special.
gucci-on-fleek 8 hours ago [-]
It's unsurprising from a financial perspective, since both oil and gas (directly) and rat eradication (indirectly) make the province a ton of money.
Got to love those live demos. Eating rat poison in front of the audience to prove it is safe!
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!
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.
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
"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.
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?)
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.
Unlike the sibling though I couldn't claim a nice neighborhood, it was near a soy processing factory.
Which means understanding and maintaining these systems is still valuable as even if millions aren’t actively dying, that can change,
My friend got Lyme disease from a tick though so I can't agree with that part
(not to say that alberta will stay that lucky forever)
Possible the bite happened elsewhere and just wasn't discovered until she got back home though. She does travel around a bit
Gophers everywhere though.
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...
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.
Aren't they native?
How does a balrog reproduce btw?
On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech, global war on rats (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17821534 - Aug 2018 (1 comment)
On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech war on rats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9540096 - May 2015 (32 comments)
I thought there had been other threads about this but couldn't find them. Anyone?
Cats are no match for New York City's rats (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38333054 - Nov 2023 (77 comments)
How rats became an inescapable part of city living - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413214 - Mar 2019 (52 comments)
The Case for Leaving City Rats Alone (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19207172 - Feb 2019 (14 comments)
Drones Help Rid Galapagos Island of Invasive Rats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078518 - Feb 2019 (58 comments)
New Zealand’s War on Rats (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16891549 - April 2018 (34 comments)
New Zealand’s War on Rats Could Change the World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15730337 - Nov 2017 (3 comments)
They aren't doing a good job of keeping them "down" if they're on planes.
clearly an article sponsored by Big Mouse
A few years ago, a coyote mom with her 5 pups set up shop on my front lawn. She'd keep a weather eye on me, and me on her, and we got along fine. Over the summer, the number of pups dwindled. I saw a severed head of one a ways away, I think it was done by an eagle. I think only 2 survived the summer.
I sometimes see 6 eagles at a time circling overhead. One flew by so close I could have touched its wingtip. Wow!
A bobcat lives nearby. I see his tracks in the snow, and saw him a couple times.
I live well within the Seattle metropolitan area. Isn't it amazing?
Bald eagles indeed!
>One of the most celebrated claims about Yellowstone’s wolves is facing a major challenge. Scientists say the study behind the famous trophic cascade story relied on flawed methods that overstated the ecological impact of wolf recovery. Their reanalysis found no evidence for a dramatic, park-wide surge in willow growth. Instead, the effects appear smaller and vary from place to place.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260613215510.h...
I live rural (Ontario) and we hear but never see them. But if you go into town, they're a frequent occurrence. Grabbing people's pets and stuff.
If it was just foxes... fine. But coyotes can be a problem.
but i've seen stories/footage of people's dogs-on-leashes getting attacked and that's a bit scary
I would like to mention that, even though Alberta is rat free, we still have mice that can make your life misreble if they somehow enter your house/office.
I may not live in Alberta, but luckily rats aren't really a thing in my neck of the woods. Travel an hour down the highway and it's a different story.
Also, as an aside, people often don't believe me when I say I've never seen a cockroach before in my life. Not a one. I've seen pictures of em, and I'm pretty sure if I saw one of those things irl I would absolutely shit myself.
https://www.gopherholemuseum.org/
My dad and uncles lived near the southern border as kids, would hunt rats by the train station/grain elevator with a .22 back in the 50's & 60's.
Okay, I kid, but it was almost that bad. We say there are no houses in Florida without cockroaches, just houses where they (mostly) aren't visible.
Now I live in Singapore, famous for being a clean city, and there are rats and cockroaches galore. Tropics, man....
I always thought this was interesting (how many people are super scared of cockroaches). I'm absolutely terrified of bugs, I see cockroaches very rarely, and while I wouldn't pet one... They're not too bad? There's tons of bugs that are way scarier. Spiders, house centipedes, camel crickets. And that's just the stuff that actually exists near me. If I encountered an average Australian insect, good God, I'd run screaming. But cockroaches? Eh
I assume it's because cockroaches are associated with filth, and they tend to occur in large numbers. But as individual bugs, on the surface level they're not too bad. (Not "disagreeing" or anything, just think the different perspectives are neat)
https://www.epa.gov/ipm/cockroaches-and-schools
Except for whatever reason, I am absolutely terrified of moths and butterflies. I don't want to be touched by either of those ever and I don't want them inside my house. I can appreciate butterflies are pretty and colourful and all that but I still don't want them to be near me.
That one is pretty shocking. When I lived in South Carolina I remember I used to walk this one road late at night. Once it was dark enough I could see them scattering underneath the streetlights on the fucking sidewalk. Reminded me of sidewalk lizards in Florida, but grosser. I live in the Midwest now. I’m just glad they’re smaller here and don’t fly.
But they maintain such a critically low number through aggressive, non-stop actions that we declare it "rat free", though that's a misnomer. Similar to the measles free status doesn't actually mean measles free, but rather that it isn't spreading uncontrolled.
Though as someone who lives in Ontario, I just wanted to add that I've never seen a vermin rat in my life in this province. Not in Toronto or its subways, not on its streets, nor in various other cities throughout the province. I've seen mice, of course, but never rats. I know they exist here, but someone having not experienced them doesn't mean much.
But wild rats are rare. Albertans have grown so unaccustomed to rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of the 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats.
Definitely not my experience. Lived at Spadina & Dundas.
We also have a lot of "sovereign citizen" people pushing misinformation about the safety of the various chemicals used, attempting to deny inspectors onto properties, and general complaints about helicopter/drone dispersal in inaccessible areas and large farms/properties.
Are you an economic calculation problem denier?
eliminate smallpox. Check.
eliminate measles. Own goal.
https://cr.usembassy.gov/sections-offices/aphis/screwworm-pr...
also Alberta, Canada mentioned
Relevant government website for those curious
We have online reporting for rat sightings that they take action on