It is still the off-season, so I thought I'd share an interesting Canadian factoid to lighten the load of my fellow Dubbers...enjoy!
Albertans have a take-no-prisoners attitude towards rats. For decades the province ran advertising telling residents to fear rats and kill them on sight. There's a heavily inspected rat control zone along the Saskatchewan border and pet rats are banned throughout the province. But Alberta's key weapon is the provincial rat patrol, a team of eight pest-control officers armed with shotguns, tasked with inspecting the control zone and spreading 10 tonnes of poison annually. No other jurisdiction has created a dedicated unit with the role of quickly snuffing out any rats who make it across a border.
"Alberta's got a real Alberta Advantage – we don't have rats," Mr. Merrill said between gulps of chocolate milk, his favourite drink, while driving the 500-kilometre control zone that falls under his purview. "There's a cost to rats. A farmer with a wooden bin would have to pay $1,500 for a new floor each time they chew through. The problem isn't that they eat that much wheat, but they contaminate a lot."
