For nearly seven decades, Alberta has been winning the war on rats

Alberta's Rat Patrol has eyes everywhere. So a young woman's seemingly innocuous social media post about her rat was passed on to provincial officials, who then had to deliver the sad news: the domesticated pest had to go.

The owner wasn't in trouble, but he had a decision to make: euthanize the rat or find him a home outside of Alberta. So, in mid-March, the beady-eyed rodent was sent east to live with family members in Saskatchewan.

Happy, Alberta. The province remains free of rats – well.

The story was told to The Globe and Mail by Karen Wickerson, Alberta Agriculture's rat and pest program specialist, who has been on the front lines of the nearly 75-year war between the province and the pests. The province is winning, but only with relentless vigilance.

Pet rats, which have been illegal in the province since the 1950s, are not really a problem. These are savages who ride in from other provinces and try to settle down. They're sneaking into Alberta — there's no stopping it — but what gives the province bragging rights is that it doesn't have a stable population of rats, Ms. Wickerson explained.

He said many Albertans are willing to report rat sightings, with some sharing stories of their parents and grandparents fighting decades ago. However, most reports given in good faith are not rats. About 50 percent are muskrats, he said. Then there are mice, gophers, mice and squirrels.

Although the public provides most of the reports, pest control inspectors hired and supervised by rural municipalities along the Alberta-Saskatchewan border do most of the rat control.

The first official sighting of a Norway rat or Rattus norvegicus, was in Alberta in the summer of 1950 on a farm that hugs the Saskatchewan border. Health officials discovered it by chance while studying the effects of another pest species, the sylvatic plague of Richardson's squirrels. The Alberta government, fearing that rats would spread disease, but realizing that they could bite into the economy, transferred responsibility for rat control from health to the agriculture department.

And that's where the real battle in Alberta began before the oilmen and the flamboyant went head-to-head.

The tiny creatures were officially declared a pest under Alberta's Agricultural Pest Act that year, making it the duty of all Albertans to “exterminate” the rats and prevent them from taking root. The problem was that most people at the time couldn't pick a rat out of a range of rodents, and most still can't. Even fewer people knew what to do if they actually saw one.

On a chilly day last December, a three-man team from the Cypress County Sheriff's Office in southeastern Alberta, armed with Ramex rat poison, checked for signs of rats on a local farm as part of a routine check. They walked slowly through the silage pit, the aging barn and the grain bin, looking for rat fungus, burrows, or chewed-up pits.

The group found nothing to indicate the program was working, said county councilman Blaine Brost, whose family has owned the land for more than a century.

“I've never seen a rat,” he said. “Maybe five years ago, my brother came roaring here and was very happy to find one. We all looked – it was a dead muskrat.”

Lisa Sulz, the county's agricultural supervisor, said the last significant rat conflict was about a decade ago at a local landfill. The insects, believed to have arrived by train or truck, infested the dump by the dozen and eluded capture for months despite bait traps and the use of infrared digital cameras to track their movements.

His colleagues joked that the only rat they see in Cyprus County today is the taxidermied rat in his office.

In the 1950s, stored rats were distributed to agricultural offices for research, Saskatchewan officials helped train pest control inspectors, and rat control conferences were held in six towns in eastern Alberta. Thousands of posters and pamphlets were also distributed to railway stations, schools and postal workers.

One poster, reminiscent of wartime advertisements, read: “Can't ignore the rat. It threatens health, home, and production. It carries germs. It destroys property. It causes waste.” And in big red font: “KILL HER!” Another sign featured a mug shot of a rat with its top two canines: “Not needed until dead!”

Alberta was no match for the Rats at first. The growing breeders spread rapidly along the eastern border of the province, reaching 270 km by 1952, and they began to move westward. There was also a public backlash, and several people were even prosecuted for helping the four-legged fugitives.

By the 1960s, infestations had dropped dramatically to one to five cases per year. They are still rare today.

If you want to see it live, you'll have to go to Calgary, where rats have laid claim to local recycling plants. There's no record of how many there are, but two things are clear: rats can multiply, and they don't want to leave these five-star resorts with cardboard and plastic buffets littered with food waste. food waste.

The situation is under control, Ms. Wickerson said, but the decades-long war continues.