The Alberta Rat War

In April of 2019, Gary was looking around online when he found himself on the Wikipedia page for the Norway rat.

I don't know why, but sometimes you go down a rabbit hole in Wikipedia, you start looking at pages, and then someone on the rats and then, yeah, you scroll down.

The Norway rat, also known as a brown rat, a sewer rat, and a common rat, spreads disease, feasts on garbage, bites babies, damages crops, and climbs through sewer pipes and up into toilet bowls.

It is the dominant rat in North America and Europe, and it's at home the world over.

And illustrating this very fact was a little map included on the Norway Rats Wikipedia page, the page Gary was looking at.

You see the map, you know, the world map of where rats live.

On the map, everywhere the Norway rat lives was a fire engine red, and everywhere it doesn't live was gray.

And except for some gray territory above the Arctic Circle, the whole map was bright red.

Because the Norway rat lives everywhere.

Or does it?

So then I thought to myself, huh, that's not right.

There are no rats in Alberta.

The Canadian province of Alberta, where Gary grew up, sits just north of Montana.

On a map, it looks like a piece of construction paper with the lower left-hand corner torn off.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Alberta launched a serious, effective, well-publicized rat eradication and containment program.

One that's still going on.

Alberta is the largest single rat-free landmass in the entire world, and it's our job as the rat patrol to keep it that way.

That's a clip from the 1986 TV movie drama Rat Tales about a unit of the Albertan Rat Patrol.

And there hasn't just been a TV show.

Alberta's rat-free status has been in newspapers the world over, been the subject of viral tweets, and long been something of a calling card for the province.

It's something that sets us apart from the rest of Canada and the United States as well.

So that's something that Albertans are proud of.

So when Gary saw this map saying that rats were in Alberta, he smelled a rat.

He clicked on the map to see what was going on.

And it was at this point that he realized he'd stumbled upon a very contentious subject.

Kind of like a Cold War where, you know,

one side fires a salvo and the other one fires a salvo back.

Since 2008, Wikipedia users had toggled the map back and forth 13 times.

A struggle between people like Gary, who were confident that Alberta is essentially rat-free, and everybody else.

People thought that it was like government propaganda, that it couldn't be real.

They said that there was no proof that there are no rats in Alberta.

Like, I don't know what would constitute proof.

it's like men in black what kind of proof would you uh would you want that there are no aliens disguised as humans living in new york city right

i totally understand gary's frustration it's hard to prove a negative even when the alberton provincial government has your back

but i also really understand the skeptics as a new yorker as someone who woke up the other morning with a dead rat splayed out on the sidewalk right in front of her apartment the idea that there is a place in north America, right above Montana, that has no rats?

Come on.

How could that possibly be?

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you want to be a total stickler, from time to time, there are rats inside Alberta's provincial borders.

But compared to almost everywhere else on the planet, Alberta really does have its rat problem extremely well in hand.

It really is, pretty much, rat-free.

In this episode, we're going to burrow rat-like into the past to find out how Alberta did this, why it couldn't have happened anywhere else, and what it cost, and not just in Canadian dollars.

The explanation tells us a lot about rats and a lot about humans, two species more alike than we like to think.

And I hope you'll stick around even if you hate rats.

Because let me tell you: in this story, they really get theirs.

So, today, on Dakota Ring,

how did Alberta, Canada stave off the rat?

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds.

Visit progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

It's a very unique job, right?

No one else has a rat and pest program specialist in Canada or, you know, the world for that matter.

So I feel so lucky to have stumbled on this job.

That's Karen Wickerson.

As she just intimated, she is the rat and pest program specialist for the province of Alberta.

And right off the bat, I wanted her to explain to us what it means for Alberta to be rat-free.

So what it means is we don't allow populations of rats to establish in the province.

So, at any given time, there could be a rat in Alberta, but there's a whole infrastructure set up to root them out, ideally before they hunker down, mate, and multiply.

Before, as Karen said, they establish a population.

But the province will deal with rat populations too, by which I mean kill them.

Karen, walk me through how it works.

Say you're a rat and you find yourself in Alberta.

You probably got there by coming over the province's eastern border with Saskatchewan or in recent decades by hitching a ride from the west, usually one rat at a time on a truck or an RV.

So if you figure if you're riding from British Columbia and the neighboring province in a vehicle for say eight hours and you're under the hood, it's hot

and uncomfortable.

And by the time you get here, you're dehydrated and you're hungry and you hop off the vehicle and then usually you die.

If it's not the dehydration, hunger, solitude, and the strange environment that gets you, it's the people.

We rely largely on the public to report these rat sightings.

Albertans are strongly encouraged to call or email the government's rat tip line, 410 rats, if they think they have seen a rat.

And if it is a rat, one of the hundreds of pest control officers employed by the province is sent out to take care of it.

But as it turns out, usually it's not a rat.

Because Albertans have never lived with rats.

They don't often know what they look like.

Karen had all her stats ready to go.

So for the total year of 2020, I received 481 reported rat sightings.

of which 455 were non-rat sightings.

So 26 were confirmed rats.

I'm just going to repeat that.

455 out of 481 suspected rat sightings, 95% of suspected rat sightings were not rats.

Instead, about half were muskrats.

The muskrat is the most commonly mistaken rodent for a rat in Alberta.

We have on our website, I don't know if you saw the

crit, we have a critters most oftenly mistaken for a rat where you can check it out.

I did.

Throw in pocket gophers, deer mice, and a couple different kind of squirrels.

And you have almost all of the rat sightings in Alberta last year.

As I said, 95%

of the 5% left, the 26 real rat sightings from 2020.

Eight were actual infestations.

And an infestation in Alberta is when there is more than one rat.

So in one year, in the whole province, they found 18 single rats and eight so-called infestations, where said infestations might just be two rats.

As someone who lives in a place famously and actually full of rats, this number struck me as laughably small.

It's so funny.

I mean, this is like, I grew up in New York City and I live in New York City.

And so it's just really funny, like what you get inured to.

Yeah.

How often do you walk down the street during daylight hours and see a rat?

You don't do it.

It's not very often, but I can't say it's never happened.

And at night, a little more.

I would say probably five or six times a year but just even as these words were coming out of my mouth

i realized i was underestimating

dramatically the subway too no more than that it's more it's a lot there's a lot of rats i don't know what to say there's a lot of rats

i've been paying more attention to rats than i usually do and i've seen about five or six or seven in the past two months alone and i'm lucky rats are having a particularly robust season in the city and have reportedly taken to jumping on tables and outdoor restaurant kiosks.

Even so, as a proud, jaded New Yorker, my impulse, as you just heard, is to play it all down, to take it in stride.

But in Alberta, they don't do that.

Alberta is a place where a rat, one rat, can get covered by the local news.

It was a smoke break Dan Ryder will never forget.

Just out of the corner of my eye, there's, I saw something jump.

What he saw was this.

Yep, a rat found right here in the the garage of his new Brighton home in Calgary.

It left its market.

That's a video segment from the Calgary Suns website.

So let's move on to the obvious next question.

How did such a rat-free paradise come to exist?

Listen.

That's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron.

The sound of captivating electric performance,

dynamic drive, and the quiet confidence of ultra-smooth handling.

The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV.

This is electric performance, redefined.

The fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron.

Lowe's knows how to help make your home holiday ready for less.

Get Select Style Selections vinyl flooring for just $1.99 per square foot and have it installed before the festivities begin.

Our team can help you every step of the way.

See a Lowe's Lowe's Red Vest Associate or visit Lowe's.com slash holiday install to get started.

Lowe's, we help, you save.

Basic install only.

Date restrictions apply.

Subject to availability.

Installed by independent contractors.

See Associate for details.

Contiguous U.S.

only.

So in order to explain how Alberta kept rats out, I need to give you a quick primer on a few things about Alberta and a few things about rats that help make their relationship so singular.

I also want to add, this is one of the rare decoder that's not primarily about an American phenomenon.

But we're still Americans, so we're going to be talking about Canada like you don't know very much about it.

If you do, sorry.

Okay, so first up, the Norway rat.

It's one of the two most populous rat species.

The other, the black rat, traveled around the world first and is the rat that helped spread the black death through Europe in the late Middle Ages.

But the Norway rat, also known as the Brown rat, is bigger, more aggressive, and can tolerate colder temperatures than the Black Rat.

So it now dominates most cities and places in colder climates.

To be clear, we're not talking about pet rats here.

The common domesticated rat is a kind of Norway rat, but they have been selectively bred to be physically and psychologically distinct from their wild brethren, and they aren't a menace to human health.

Still, you can't have one in Alberta.

Anyway, wild Norway rats are said to be responsible for harming 20% of all agricultural products worldwide, and the Norway rat causes billions of dollars worth of damage in the U.S.

alone and bites about 3,000 to 4,000 people a year.

Though it's officially called the Norway rat and its scientific name is Rattus norvegicus, it's not really from Norway.

It's thought to have originated in Central Asia, but it spread out from there and was given its scientific name at the end of the 18th century in England.

Robert Sullivan is the author of the book, Rats.

The English biologists named it the Norway rat, thinking it was coming from Norway or wanting it to come from Norway given that there were political troubles between Norway and England at the time, when in fact it was likely coming from Denmark.

As this naming snafu makes clear, people have long liked to think of the Norway rat as coming from some unsavory someplace else, an invader that does not belong, even as it makes itself right at home.

And the Norway rat has been able to make itself right at home almost everywhere for a host of reasons, most of which can be boiled down to: it is just an extremely hardy, adaptable, smart little creature.

It can squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter, fall 50 feet without getting hurt, learn to recognize poison and traps, and is so fertile, two rats can become 15,000 in a year.

But maybe the cleverest thing about this animal is that it has hitched itself to the most dominant animal of all, us.

It's adapted to live alongside us.

And there's a term that sometimes people use, commensal,

sort of fancy Latin term for eating at the same plate.

We share the table with rats, even though we don't like to think about it.

The rats started eating at the North American table in the late 1700s, brought to the eastern seaboard on ships.

They infested port cities like New York and then started moving across the continent continent along with European settlers.

By the 20th century, the rat is in most places in North America, but not Alberta.

This is just a very important thing to understand about Alberta's whole rat situation.

It has never had rats.

And for a long time, that was just happenstance, just two lucky breaks.

The first has to do with density.

Alberta only became a province in 1905, at which point it had a population of about 78,000 people in an area nearly the size of Texas.

Rats live where we live, but the more sparsely populated and spread out our living arrangements, the fewer rats there tend to be.

And Alberta was sparsely populated and spread out much later than most other places in North America.

The second lucky break is maybe even more important.

It's just Alberta's geography.

Karen Wickerson again.

To the north, it's very cold, boreal forests, they can't survive.

To the west, we have mountains,

and they can't travel over mountains.

And then Montana, it's fairly mountainous, and the farms are spread out quite far in Montana.

Like I said earlier, Alberta looks like a piece of construction paper with the lower left-hand corner ripped off, the one ragged stretch running along the Rocky Mountains.

This gives the province five edges.

And what Karen is saying is that rats cannot and do not come across four of them.

There is only one edge, one border open to overland rat migration, the one to the east, the farmlands that abut the province of Saskatchewan.

Now, Saskatchewan itself only got rats on its own eastern border in 1920.

But by the late 1940s, the rats are inching closer and closer to Alberta, the only temperate place in North America that doesn't have them yet.

Before the rats get there, there, though, I want to give you one other piece of background information.

And I said, Alberta is the kind of place that takes pride in the ways it's different from elsewhere.

Or let me put it like this: when Canadians are trying to explain Alberta to Americans, they usually shorthand it by saying Alberta is like Texas.

Like Texas, Alberta has a big energy industry built around the fourth largest oil reserve in the world, which was first tapped in 1947.

It also historically had a lot of ranchers and thus a cowboy culture all its own.

But in saying Alberta is like Texas, people are also getting at the fact that it's independent-minded, pleased to be itself.

And this was true back in the late 1940s, too, when it was this young, can-do, rapidly growing province that had so recently and so capably established itself out on the frontier.

And it's at this moment that the rat scurries up to the province's eastern border, the eastern front, and Alberta's war against the rat truly begins.

And no, I'm not exaggerating when I say war.

The first rats in Alberta were found in the summer of 1950 outside of the town of Alsacs on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.

The rats were initially discovered by employees of the Department of Health who were looking for plague in ground squirrels, but turned up rats instead.

This was a big public health concern.

Rats can be carriers of plague, but it immediately became an agricultural one too.

The rats just caused a lot of destruction.

Now, back in the 50s when they hit, all our greeneries were wooden.

Phil Merrill worked for the province's pest control program for four decades and ran it from 2010 to 2019, right before Karen Wickerson, who he hired.

And the rat could run underneath that greenery and find shelter there and then bore a hole in it and literally destroy the floor of that greenery in one winter.

The rats would also eat eggs and chicken, destroy feed and grain, eating it or just getting excrement all over it while potentially passing on disease, not only to humans, but to livestock and poultry.

The provincial government estimated that the rats would cause about $25 million in damage annually, put the Department of Agriculture in charge and swung into action.

The department updated an existing law against pests that funded pest control officers in municipalities across the province and made it the legal responsibility of every person in the province to destroy the Norway rat, which is a quote.

In 1951, after finding 39 rat infestations on the border, it also created a zone of control, a strip of land next to Saskatchewan that stretches about 18 miles into Alberta and 323 miles north from the Montana border.

And then it hired a private pest control company to exterminate the bejesus out of that whole area.

When we started the program way back in the 50s, we hired a pest control company and they just pumped arsenic underneath any greenery along the Saskatchewan border.

Between June of 1952 and July of 1953, exterminators not only set traps, they sprayed about 140,000 pounds, nearly 70 tons of arsenic trioxide powder on 8,000 buildings on 2,700 farms in a 4,000 square mile area.

The arsenic powder would give the rats blisters on their feet, which allowed the arsenic to get into their blood.

Sometimes they licked the blisters, which led them to swallow some of the arsenic.

But if the arsenic was bad for the rats, as a highly toxic heavy metal poison, it was bad for everything else too.

The province began sending letters letters warning residents in the control zone that the poison was a danger to livestock, poultry, pets, and humans.

Found out that was a little too toxic.

Other things that might crawl under there.

Though the arsenic basically worked, the rats didn't spread.

It wasn't that effective.

Arsenic has a taste and a color the rats learn to avoid, and it costs a lot of money.

So in 1953, the Department of Agriculture took over the exterminating from the private company and started administering a new poison, warfarin.

Warfarin was much, much better at killing rats than any previous rodenticide.

Warfarin kills rats because it interferes with their blood clotting.

With warfarin, we might finally defeat the rats.

Warfarin is an anticoagulant and it works by essentially drowning a rat in its own blood.

To have this effect, though, a rat has to ingest warfarin multiple times over a short period.

This makes it much safer for house pets, farm animals, and people people who would have to eat it multiple times for it to cause harm to them too.

Warfarin actually has a medical use for humans as a blood thinner, often sold under the brand name Coumadin.

So the Department of Agriculture began mixing warfarin with rolled oats, a bit of icing sugar, and green confetti so kids wouldn't mistake it for food.

And then they spread it throughout the zone of control.

We put warfarin under every greenery,

which worked really well because unless they're feeding on it six or eight times, an animal wouldn't succumb.

Poison, traps, rat-proofing weren't all the province did though.

They also started a mass education campaign.

Remember, Alberta didn't actually have rats.

People had to be taught what they were and what to do about them.

In the words of a Department of Agriculture official, they had to be made rat conscious.

To this end, the Department of Agriculture ordered 50 dead rats from Winnipeg, put them in plastic cubes, and brought them around to fairs and picnics, 4-H clubs, and the Chamber of Commerce.

The province distributed tens of thousands of pamphlets with instructions on rat-proofing and rat poisoning that also told residents of the control zone: no person should spare any effort to kill every Norway rat he sees.

They also put up thousands of arresting posters.

One, which has a strong 1950s Cold War aesthetic, shows a rat crouched in the upper corner of the frame, its teeth exposed.

In slashing type, it reads, you can't ignore the rat.

He's a menace to health, home, and industry.

And then at the bottom in red, it says, kill him.

Let's keep Alberta rat-free.

This is a population that largely had never seen a rat, but grew very much to fear the rat.

George Kulpitz is a historian at the University of Calgary who specializes in environmental history.

And so

a kind of dynamic between Albertans and rats was kind of inculcated from the top down.

So I know rats cause disease.

I know they destroy property.

I know they're almost impossible to get rid of once established and that people don't like them very much.

But upon learning about the patrols and the posters and the poisons, I found myself thinking,

This seems like a lot.

Doesn't this seem like a lot?

I may be somewhat inured to rats, but like a true city dweller, I am apparently not inured to the things you have to do to fend off destructive pests.

All of this just left me with a bigger question, a deeper why.

Why did Alberta do this?

What was going on in Alberta?

Why was it so aggressive about keeping the rats out?

At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments.

It's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

Because at Blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Visit Blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost.

Rules and restrictions apply.

Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life.

Botox, onobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine.

It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month.

It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment.

Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor.

Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms.

Alert your doctor right away, as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck, and injection, site pain, fatigue, and headache.

Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness.

Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.

Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugarix's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

Why wait?

Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-Botox to learn more.

The whole Alberta rat situation kept reminding me of something.

An imaginary Cohen Brothers movie, one playing out on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, where this incredible Great Plains competence and civility gets channeled into this single-minded, bloody vendetta against the rat.

And if this were a movie, there would have been a guy, some main character for whom keeping rats out of Alberta was his life's passion.

So initially, that's what I was looking out for.

The great man of Alberta rat control history.

And there are three good candidates for this: all deceased, all Department of Agriculture employees.

Two of them conceived and piloted the program, came up with the idea for the zone of control, and wrote the pamphlets.

But when I spoke with one of their adult children, he told me that he thought his father had just been doing his job and that he had no strong feelings about rats.

The third man, Joe Gerba, was the rat program's first full-time permanent employee and the man who supervised it from 1953 to 1982.

And I heard a promising story about him from John Bourne, who ran the rat control program for decades and who worked closely with Gerba.

While he was talking to farmers, he would, to show people how safe the rat bait was, he'd dip his hand into a bag of rolled oat bait and chew on it.

And just show people this

poison is not

as bad a poison as you may think it is.

That's pretty dramatic.

But the more I learned, the more I started to think this was not a story about an individual, not even one who chomped on warfare-laced oats.

Instead, Alberta's eradication of the rat is the kind of thing that was happening all over North America in the decade after the Second World War.

Just more extreme.

Let me explain.

In the late 1940s, Western governments had recently ended the Depression, wiped out polio, and taken down the Nazis.

It was the high watermark for humanity's faith in the government's ability to achieve things, to change reality, to make the world a better place.

And governments in North America, regionally and federally, were taking that mandate seriously.

They were doing stuff.

They were up in their citizens' business.

And a lot of that stuff that they were doing was agricultural.

Specifically, they were encouraging the use of a whole new class of chemicals, pesticides, insecticides, vermicides, to protect crops and livestock, even though they didn't yet fully understand their impact on the environment.

Just one example.

All over North America, the eventually banned pesticide, DDT, was being used with abandon.

And another example, predators like coyotes were being culled with baits laced with toxins, including one developed in German-occupied territory as a rat killer that could travel through the food chain.

And the young, potent Albertan provincial government fit right in here.

It too was highly responsive to threats to public health and agriculture.

Except like I said, it was a little more extreme.

George Culpets.

The Alberta government and they were extremely proactive.

So it wasn't just about rats.

It was about all sorts of creatures.

In northern Alberta, 1952 to 56, we had a huge rabies problem.

We discovered rabies were pooling in our wildlife from Arctic fox.

And in those years, the provincial government actually set up a buffer zone 200 miles wide across the entirety of the northern province, employed hundreds of trappers and hunters to basically kill all wildlife that was coming southward.

And basically, you killed, you created killing zones, and it worked.

It's still controversial among biologists looking back at this strange.

No one's ever implemented this kind of dramatic animal control measure.

Between 1952 and 56, at minimum, 56,000 foxes were killed, 53,000 coyotes, 10,000 lynx, 5,500 wolves, 4,000 bears, and 600 skunks.

And these were all species the province explicitly was not trying to eradicate, just control, just keep out of human settlement.

And if it had that approach to animals that already lived there, well, what chance did a rat, maybe the most unloved animal in the world, have?

When it finally scurries up to Alberta's border during this exact same period, the rat's timing was either really good or if you're a rat, really bad.

Its arrival was met by an effective and energized regional government ready to intervene authoritatively and that had the chemical tools, community buy-in, and soon enough oil-backed funds funds to destroy it during an era when maximal force against animal pests seemed to have no considerable downside.

It's hard to wrap your head around, but maybe the deeper why here was just a why not.

I mean,

who wants rats?

On the province of Alberta's website, on the detailed page about the history of the rat control effort, it says the program hasn't changed markedly since 1960.

Through the 1950s, they were killing up to 80,000 rats on the border every year.

But then in 1959, it all came together.

The poisoning and the community participation and the number of rats and sightings just nosedived.

Many Albertans today, especially younger ones, don't even know about the rat program's existence.

Today, pest officers still check the farms on the border with Saskatchewan twice a year, but there are fewer farms than there used to be, and the ones that there are have steel and cement-bottomed granaries, which are rat-proof.

In 2004, they had no rats at all, and they don't prophylactically bait the area anymore.

The Eastern Front, it's pretty quiet.

It's not that there are no rats, they still have big infestations sometimes, and they're concerned about cities.

But Phil Merrill, who ran the program for years, thinks they're over the hump, that it's unlikely they will ever have a serious problem.

But I'll knock wood on his behalf.

If the Alberta rat situation has been pretty stable for the past 60 years, there's one thing that's changed during that time.

How the anti-rat forces talk about what they're doing and why.

The war on rats was launched because rats were considered a threat to crops, to property, and to human health.

Since then, Something has been added to that list.

Local ecology.

Island ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to rats.

And in places like New Zealand and parts of Australia, rats have driven a number of native species, particularly birds, to the edge of extinction.

For this reason, there have been and continue to be ongoing attempts to completely exterminate rats and other rodent predators from these places.

Alberta, in this context, was ahead of the curve.

And even in Alberta, ecology is part of how they talk about rats now.

I am an animal lover, don't get me wrong, but I do understand though what rats are capable of.

Karen Wickerson again.

They're the most destructive invasive species in the world, and they have wiped out so many populations of native birds and

animals in a lot of other places.

So I recognize the importance of keeping Alberta rat free for many reasons.

The Norway rat is an invasive species, an animal from someplace else.

And as such, it has no set ecological niche, just a disruptive one.

They eat everything, they compete with local animals for food, all while breeding prodigiously.

As people said to me over and over again, they're not native.

But this is where I think it behooves us humans to try to see things a little more expansively, to be a little gentler in our thinking about the rat.

Because all of the terms I just used, invasive, disruptive, native, are wobbly ones, especially in the context of an animal like the rat that is co-evolved to live with humanity.

Rats may not be native to North America, but in some essential sense, they are native to us, humans, because everywhere we go, we create their habitat.

Robert Sullivan, the author of Rats Again.

The rat for me is an indicator species.

It indicates the presence of humans.

That's why rats are everywhere.

They've associated with the other creature that just has touched every single part of the globe.

The idea of native gets even more complicated in the North American context, where most people are not strictly native either.

And settlers did way more damage to human life than any rats.

Remember that pest control specialist, Joe Gerba, who ate those warfarin-laced oats?

He did that, the story goes, at a meeting with members of the Métis Nation of Alberta, one of the country's three indigenous groups.

They did not want rats, but they were concerned the government was about to lay strychnine all over their land, a pest control measure they had used in the past.

Invasive, disruptive, non-native may describe the rat, but it describes people too.

People say rats are bad.

People are good.

Rats are bad.

We have to kill the rats.

And that's kind of the end of the story.

I know a lot of people probably who listen to the podcast are humans.

And I don't want to be too hard on humans, but you know how rats are really bad and they dig up your house and they make it disgusting and they make it so you might die.

Well, you know how humans get into the earth and they start digging up this black liquid and they burn it and then everybody's going to die?

That whole bad, good thing is what's just so complicated.

And all of these complications are present in Alberta, where people staved off an invasive species with highly invasive techniques and a fear campaign for reasons that had very little to do with the well-being of the environment, but that now, decades later, recommend the province to the world.

George Culpitz.

Oddly enough, it's become something of

an ongoing means of promoting the province.

You know, come to Alberta.

At least we're rat-free.

One of the truly tricky things about all of this is that there remain lots of extremely good reasons we do not want to have rats around.

Alberta probably is better off without them.

But for me, the takeaway is that even in their welcome absence, even in a place that is rat-free, rats and humans are connected.

They're a mirror species.

They show us us, unflattering as that is, as much as we don't want to see it.

If you live in a city like New York, the truth is all around you, and the rat's tearing through a garbage bag of our rotten food, scurrying into our apartment buildings, scuttling around subway tracks, waiting for the train, attracted to all of the places and people we don't take good enough care of.

But it's true in Alberta too, just in a different way.

The way we showed that, like the rat, we can act in some pretty vicious ways to get what we want.

Say what you will about the rat, it's not the most dangerous animal of all.

Don't get me wrong, I still shriek and walk in the street whenever I see one on the sidewalk.

But our relationship to rats is complex.

So complex that when I'm trying to shake off the rat heebie-jeebies now, I think of something Phil Merrill, who spent 40 years killing rats, said to me about them.

What do you think of rats?

What do you think?

I like them.

They're smart and clever.

They're just a big mouse, and that's way more smarter than a mouse.

Anyway, I don't hate the rat at all.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed and Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin.

It was edited by Benjamin Frisch and Gabriel Roth.

Decodering is produced by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

A very special thank you to Michelle Dean and David Lobe.

See you next week.

Oh, watch your step.

Wow, your attic is so dark.

Dark?

I know, right?

It's the perfect place to stream horror movies.

What movie is that?

I haven't pressed play yet.

ATT Fiber with Al-Fi covers your whole house.

Even your really, really creepy attic turned home theater.

Jimmy, what have I told you about scaring our guests?

Get ATT Fiber with All-Fi and live like a gagillionaire.

Limited availability coverage may require extenders at additional charge.