The Hindu : International : Setting the cats among the rats

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Sep 30, 2004

International

International

Setting the cats among the rats

MONTERREY, SEPT. 29. Hundreds of cats are being recruited in the northern Mexican State of Chihuahua to attack a rat population that has grown into the hundreds of thousands. Health officials said on Tuesday that they hope to get as many as 700 felines and send them to Atascaderos, an isolated farm village in the rugged Tarahumara mountains, a region where officials estimate there are about a half million rats.

The cats are being collected in Chihuahua city, the capital of the northern State of the same name, where they will be vaccinated and checked for rabies and then sent by truck to Atascaderos, said a health official who is overseeing the recruitment. ``So far we don't have any cats, but an animal control agency already promised to donate 50,'' he said. ``Our goal is to stop the rats from reproducing and that's how we hope the cats can help.''

Advertisements asking for cat donations began appearing in Chihuahua newspapers on Monday and officials hope some 200 will be ready to travel to Atascaderos this weekend. The cats are to be given to rat-infested households in Atascaderos, a town of 3,000 people, where rats have attacked domestic animals.

People there started noticing the rodent problem a year ago when rats appeared in barns and warehouses where they stored their produce. Farmers started using traps and poison, but the effort backfired: Cats and other animals that prey on rats started dying instead. ``Now they have no cats left and the rats just keep reproducing,'' an official said. A spokesman for the municipality of Guadalupe y Calvo, where Atascaderos is located, said about 800 households are infested with the rats, with an average of 200 rats per home.

The Animal Protection Society in Monterrey was alarmed by the plan and said that sending stray cats that have not been sterilised could create more problems. ``Now there is going to be a plague of cats and what are they going to do — start to exterminate cats?'' a member asked. ``It would be a very big mistake .'' ``It's like the problem in `The Pied Piper of Hamelin' tale, but unfortunately that flutist doesn't exist and what we have here is an imminent health problem,'' an official said. — AP

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