Small Problems?
In case you're having a bad day; if you're feeling like every little thing is going wrong and nothing could be worse, read on. The news from Hunan province will put a different slant on your day and help you realize just how small your problems really are.
Central China's Hunan province has been experiencing a plague of rats. That's right, an estimated two billion of the rodents have been making their presence felt in 22 counties around Dongting Lake, chomping through crops there to a boogie beat for the last two weeks.
Flooding on the Yangrze River flushed them out and caused farming communities to be overrun by the pests. Tan Lulu, working for the conservation group WWF in Changsha has reported that farmers are using every weapon to hand to fight the inundation. One strike with a shovel can kill three rats at a time, they are so numerous.
The state newspaper, the China Daily, reports that 1.6 million hectares of farmland have been overrun by the rats who have eaten crop roots and stems. They also claim that area residents have killed more than 2.3 million rats, creating 90 tons of rat corpses.
I'm not sure exactly how they would have arrived at their numbers, but it doesn't change the fact that there's very little in the way of a bad hair day that could come anywhere close to this. The very real worry for sanitation officials is the outbreak of disease, either carried by the live rats, and/or brought about by the pile-up of corpses.
According to Lulu, a drought that preceded the flooding made the problem that much worse. The drought exposed land that used to be part of Dongting Lake, and the opportunistic rodents moved in to take up residence. When the flooding occured, they fled to higher ground.
Anybody got some rat poison to spare?
Central China's Hunan province has been experiencing a plague of rats. That's right, an estimated two billion of the rodents have been making their presence felt in 22 counties around Dongting Lake, chomping through crops there to a boogie beat for the last two weeks.
Flooding on the Yangrze River flushed them out and caused farming communities to be overrun by the pests. Tan Lulu, working for the conservation group WWF in Changsha has reported that farmers are using every weapon to hand to fight the inundation. One strike with a shovel can kill three rats at a time, they are so numerous.
The state newspaper, the China Daily, reports that 1.6 million hectares of farmland have been overrun by the rats who have eaten crop roots and stems. They also claim that area residents have killed more than 2.3 million rats, creating 90 tons of rat corpses.
I'm not sure exactly how they would have arrived at their numbers, but it doesn't change the fact that there's very little in the way of a bad hair day that could come anywhere close to this. The very real worry for sanitation officials is the outbreak of disease, either carried by the live rats, and/or brought about by the pile-up of corpses.
According to Lulu, a drought that preceded the flooding made the problem that much worse. The drought exposed land that used to be part of Dongting Lake, and the opportunistic rodents moved in to take up residence. When the flooding occured, they fled to higher ground.
Anybody got some rat poison to spare?
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