How Alberta Won the Rat Race

Along an 18-mile strip of land between the Canadian province

of Alberta and its neighbor Saskatchewan, the rat patrol keeps guard.

An eight-person team, armed with poison and shotguns, hunts daily for

any sign of the rodent invaders.

The Alberta rat patrol checks more than 3,000 farms a year, but

it rarely sees an actual rat. Alberta has 4.3 million people, 255,000

square miles, and no rats—bar the stray handful that make it into the

killing zone each year. Ever since 1950, a sternly enforced program of

exclusion and extermination has kept the province rat-free. Nowhere else

in the world comes close; the only other rat-free areas are isolated

islands such as the remote British territory of South Georgia.