Post

Rats are virtually everywhere humans live. Except for Alberta, Canada. Most residents there have never even seen one. How did they eliminate a pest we take as a fact of life? By waging war.

Albertans - worried about disease and crops - called a state of emergency. They set up a 'Rat Control Zone' on the border, covered it in pesticides, and sent inspectors to set up watch. To rally enough people, some bureaucrats were reassigned from weed inspection to rat patrols.

They adopted Soviet-style war posters, hosted radio shows about the dangers of ignoring rats, and sent community educators to run town halls. One chewed on warfarin-treated oats while taking questions to assuage residents' concerns about the pesticide, so they'd stop throwing out treated traps.

This required a willingness to spend a lot of money (C$1.75M), time, and effort on what would seem to many to be a nuisance problem. It's hard to imagine most local governments rallying the resources necessary to do something this today.