In a single district in the North Eastern province of Hunan alone, farmers, armed with ferrets and shovels, have killed about 2 million rats. And the count is still on! The war on rats began after an estimated 2 billion marauding rats spread themselves across 20 counties in central Hunan and destroyed 1.6 million hectares of crop.

The rat plague began in June when excessive rains lifted the water level on the Dongting Lake. Dongting, China’s second-largest freshwater lake is a large, shallow body of water surrounded by mountain chains. An impressive characteristic of the lake is that it is inter-nested.

Depending on the season, concentric ridges of land appear in the lake in many areas. The appearance of Dongting Lake changes throughout the different seasons, sometimes even during the same day. Many ancient Chinese poems and stories were written about the beauty of Dongting Lake.

But till the deluge happened no one had ever written about or taken notice of the rodent inhabitants of the islands. But when the islands submerged in the rising water, billions of its rat inhabitants fled their homes and migrated to the nearby dry lands.

The alarmed people in these areas laid out loads of rat poison but these killed only a few thousand. In desperation, the farmers took the matter into their own hands and began to crush the rats at sight. Officials are now working overtime to cremate or bury the tons of heaped up bodies.

Rat plague!

A rat invasion generally happens after a drought year, as during the dry year, the rats have the space and time to multiply in epic proportions. In India too we have had a few major, post monsoon rat plagues.

The one in 1878 in Maharashtra was so bad that in some places, as soon as the grain was sown, the rats scratched it up and ate it.

The situation was worsened by the religious prejudices of the people. It was commonly thought that the spirits of those who died of starvation in the famine in the previous year entered the bodies of the rats and ate the unripe grains and seedlings. So the cultivators did practically nothing to check the damage. Even the rewards announced to kill the rats had no takers!

When in Mizoram, in April this year, the bamboo shoots started to flower heavily, the tribesmen began to shudder. From past experience they knew that the bountiful flowering attracts hordes of rats. Not only do these rats thrive on the bamboo flowers, they also then go on to destroy the farmers’ crops.

Mizo oral tradition has it that this deadly ecological cycle, a phenomenon known locally as Mautam, is repeated every 48 years. The Mautam had struck in 1910-11 and again in 1958-59. The people are so sure of it that they have not even planted the rice and corn this year!