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111 4 Norway Rats Back-Alley Ecology in the Chemical Age A Norway rat emerged from his burrow as dusk fell over Baltimore’s east side on an early spring evening in 1937. The air carried a faint scent of food, as well as scents of people, dogs, and cats. The high-board wooden fence surrounding the backyard provided reliable shelter from these minor threats despite its ramshackle condition—perhaps because of it. The rat’s gray-brown fur brushed against the fence as he trotted along it, retracing the greasy line left a few inches above the ground by generations of his kin.1 He poked his nose under the fence, testing the space with his sensitive whiskers. His whiskers barely grazed the boards, signaling to him that he had more than enough room to pass through. On the other side, the rat found the neighbors’ back stairs, atop which sat a bucket of kitchen scraps, its contents lean in these hard times, waiting to be dumped in a busted wooden barrel by the alley. The rat had seen this bucket there before. If he had not, he would have approached much more tentatively. His wariness served him well; new objects in the environment could be traps or poisons.2 One of the larger rats on the block, he easily reached the first step with his front paws and bounded up crooked wooden stairs until he reached the bucket and tipped it over. Another large male rat joined him, and the two licked juice from crab shells and nibbled at tiny scraps of meat left inside. Suddenly the light came on in the kitchen and a small dog barked from inside the back screen door. Startled, the rats reared up and squealed. The dog retreated, and the rats fled. They jumped down to the ground, scurried across the yard, and squeezed under the fence and into the alley. 112 The Promises of Modern Pest Control Many of the block’s two-hundred-some rats departed their burrows after sunset to eat, drink, and mate. Across the alley, a pregnant female lapped at a tub where rain had collected during a morning shower. She had given birth to five litters of six to nine young in the past year, but many of her pups died young from disease, starvation, or predation. A young rat peeked out from under the rotted and gnawed bottom of a privy-shed door and ducked back inside upon seeing a cat peering down from the back porch. Large adult rats had little to fear from dogs or cats, however.3 Another young rat gnawed with her strong jaws and ever-growing teeth at the edges of a hole in the wooden platform of the back porch, enlarging the hole enough to squeeze inside. Several rats made their homes in the house’s cavity walls, rotting floors, and crumbling cellar. They enjoyed better access to stored food than their outdoor cousins, for the pantry consisted of open shelving without cabinet doors. They also transmitted fleas, mites, parasites, and bacteria to one another more easily than their backyard cousins. Indoor rats faced more frequent confrontations with human residents, which often proved fatal for rats, and sometimes injurious, infectious , or deadly to people.4 During the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar years, city-dwellers across the United States struggled with rats and other pests supported by degraded housing and neighborhood environments. Authorities from both public and private sectors urged cities to support rat-proofing of ill-maintained homes. Still, many Americans attempted to control pests by applying pesticides in and around their homes, especially after 1945, when effective new chemicals became available for killing insects and rodents. Amid the pro-pesticide zeitgeist of the postwar years, some scientists and health advocates promoted an explicitly ecological and antichemical approach to pest control that was also funded by public resources. In the 1940s, Baltimore became the setting for two public health experiments that seemed to represent polar opposite views of rodent control. The first aimed to test a new chemical rodenticide and a community-based scheme to distribute the poison throughout the city. The other, called the Rodent Ecology Project, worked alongside a housing rehabilitation program called the Baltimore Plan and hypothesized that changes to the residential environment would reduce rat populations more sustainably without the use of chemicals. The experiments brought attention to Baltimore's rats from government, scientists, and Norway Rats: Back-Alley Ecology 113...

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