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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.

The rats we're familiar with aren't native to North America. They hitched rides on ships with Europeans, and, by the late 1940s, they'd crossed Saskatchewan and were approaching Alberta's border at 24km/year.

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.

Not everyone complied: One mayor called the focus on rats a political distraction, and another insisted there were no rats in his town and said he'd eat any found there. (He changed his mind when officials showed up with a bushel caught at his local slaughterhouse.)

But this was so obviously worth it: Neighboring Saskatchewan now spends C$1.2M/year on rat control and experiences C$15M in agricultural damage annually, while it only costs Alberta C$500K/year (< C$0.11/resident/year) to maintain elimination.

Today Alberta mans a rat sighting hotline. Of 875 reports last year, only 47 were rats; Albertans have never seen the creature, so they often mistake squirrels for one. Officials tracked a pet rat down via a license plate in a FB photo. Another was reported by an ex (they re-homed it to BC!)

The lesson is that we ought to be *far* more ambitious. Maintaining a rat-free province sounds impossible and onerous, and if attempted elsewhere would likely garner complaints about wasted taxpayer funds. But it turns out to be *cheaper* than half-hearted reactive measures.