Mapping rats moving across farm and field

The extreme food shortages of the sixteenth century saw many rodents alongside other ‘vermin’ killed for reward under the oversight of the parish, due to ‘vermin’ directives aimed at protecting grain. Long before the twentieth century, rat ‘destruction’ was therefore already an established part of farming practice. Under the term ‘ratting’, it was woven into the local economy as a seasonal necessity. At threshing time, boys and men went ratting when the rats ran out of the corn stacks, and this complemented the regular and (from an agricultural point of view) necessary work of the expert rat catcher undertaken year-round,Footnote ¹⁸ while rat and sparrow clubs paid their competitive members per rat tail for the same reason.Footnote ¹⁹

By the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century there was therefore already an extensive and long-established body of experiential knowledge and published empirical material on tackling rats, aimed at both specialists and general readers. There were sole-authored examples such as Sir James Wright, Bart., Observations upon the Important Object of Preserving Wheat and Other Grain from Vermin (1796), which focused on rats eating stored grain, and possible structural adaptations designed to address rat ‘cunning’ that would tackle it through prevention (not just killing rats). A hundred years later we find H.C. Barkley, Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching (1896), and then Mark Hovell, Rats and How to Destroy Them (1924), who advised that traps be placed in hedges and streams year-round.Footnote ²⁰ These monographs blended into the emergent literature that came to be published by specialist organizations, such as W.R. Boelter, The Rat Problem (1909), published under the auspices of the Incorporated Society for Destruction of Vermin, and dedicated print and visual and materials aimed at farmers by institutions like the Board of Agriculture (later MAFF), the Royal Agricultural Society of England, commercial producers of rat traps and vermicides, and farming magazines like Farmer's Weekly and Farmer and Stockbreeder.Footnote ²¹ As the period progressed, so the range of advice became more specialized. This was often self-represented as more ‘modern’ via the use of new methods of destruction such as ‘gas’ (water-reactive powdered compounds of cyanide), yet, driven by the need to act on the basis of rat behaviour, alongside commercial interests in some cases, re-coded old empirical knowledge, itself based on watching rats, as ‘new’, drawing on scientific methods of observation and quantification.

A typical, popular and therefore witty discussion can be seen in a long and careful description of rats and their behaviour in Chambers's Journal, which sought to outline the rat's better qualities as well as its worst in ‘justice to an object of such universal dislike’. ‘When in a state of liberty’, the journal states, for instance, ‘rats appear to be free from disease of any kind – a fact to be perhaps attributed to their great cleanliness, all their leisure time being spent sitting on end, cleaning their fur’.Footnote ²² Such observations offer us traces of rats in history: evidence that they have been watched, as well as a description of what has been observed. This is coloured in a popular text like Chambers's by human irritation, but we still see incidental evidence of rats’ activities in expressive tallies of their effects on human lives and materials, such as the ‘perpetual annoyance’ in the farmhouse of their ‘boring holes in boarded floors, undermining stone pavements, gnawing harness, killing chickens and ducks’, and appetite for ‘grain, leverets and game of all kinds’.Footnote ²³ Though country rats in particular, Pemberton has argued, were not thought diseased at the time (and were often caught in the Victorian period for use in sport by urban rat catchers),Footnote ²⁴ they were still considered ‘nuisance’ enough to leave traces in our histories, and to warrant sufficient human intervention to lead to the production of expert knowledge and creation of roles, but not enough to require statutory tools.

In the Victorian period, however, only a select few of these experts were valued as such by the populace at large. It was commonplace at the time to see the country rat catcher as being ‘usually a man of few words, and those few not always to be relied upon … a compound of the gipsy, gamekeeper, and poacher … Looked upon with suspicion by all who employ him’. Their urban counterparts seem to have been understood (within a typical rural–urban binary) as quicker, if normally dishonest: in ‘London, an honest rat-catcher is looked upon as a rarity indeed … Nevertheless, such are to be found’.Footnote ²⁵ Because it was positioned in the non-farming public's perception as something of an isolated, old-fashioned country pastime, the activity of destroying rats and those associated with it therefore functioned in periods preceding this essay as something of a boundary marker between rural and urban, the new and the old, science and art, modernity and tradition, just as the image of country rats as clean rather than diseased marked out the qualities of rural and urban human life. This changed with the emergence of concerns about plague. In the early twentieth century, it was the threat of a modern pandemic that brought the country/farm rat to the wider attention of the urban public as something more in metropolitan eyes than a distant and occasionally picturesque rural nuisance chased by boys and unreliable men, or possible object of illegal sport.Footnote ²⁶

When plague was pinpointed as having occurred in rural Britain in 1910 the link between bacillus, fleas and rats was still only newly accepted, the bacterium Y. pestis having only been discovered in Hong Kong by Alexandre Yersin in 1894, and the possible transmission route of Xenopsylla cheopis to humans from the black rat only having been proposed by Paul-Louis Simond in 1898. The hypothesis remained contentious when tested in Australia in 1901.Footnote ²⁷ Yet, in October that year, four people in Frenston, Suffolk, died of what was suspected to be ‘pneumonic plague’, and further investigation revealed that East Anglian rats were implicated.Footnote ²⁸ It was also found nearby in two hares, a ferret, dogs and a cat. Earlier outbreaks in the area were subsequently discovered to have taken place in some farm cottages by the river Orwell between December 1906/January 1907 and December 1909/January 1910. There was another occurrence in October 1911 and later two final cases in June 1918. In all, it resulted in sixteen human fatalities. Thousands of rats were killed in the process of determining the extent of the disease.Footnote ²⁹ Though this had been preceded by a much higher incidence of plague in the port at Glasgow in August–September 1900, when sixteen victims died of plague, and what were reportedly similar outbreaks in Liverpool in 1901 and Govan, Scotland, in 1903,Footnote ³⁰ and by efforts to tackle plague in the ports and cities of south China and Hong Kong from 1894,Footnote ³¹ it was this 1910 outbreak in rural England that was cited in the Parliamentary debates that led ultimately to the Rats and Mice (Destruction) Act 1919 (54 & 55 Vict. c. 76). That Act tasked every citizen with a legal obligation to remove rats from their property. In order to address the twentieth-century history of country/farm rats, it is therefore necessary to see how rats and their country habits were framed during the outbreak of plague.

The progress of what eventually became specific anti-rodent (rather than generic ‘vermin’) legislation was typical of the process in which legislative intervention was enacted after a period of laissez-faire approach. First, in this instance, plague having been reported in Suffolk (its presence in other countries and its presence on shipping already having been discussed by bodies like the Association for Schools of Public Health), the subject was addressed and returned to by national papers such as The Times, concerned about the risk of infection spreading from East Anglia to densely populated urban districts, and by publications overseas. It came to the attention of bodies such as the Royal Institute of Public Health, and was raised in Parliament.Footnote ³² Tapping into the international circulation of knowledge about rats, which had already been generated by the pandemic, the new expertise and membership of emergent cadres of specialists that had formed around plague and rats both overseas and at home were drawn upon.Footnote ³³ For example, Dr R. Bruce Low, who served for twenty-three years under the auspices of the Local Government Board on Public Health and Medical Subjects, the Advisory Board of the Army Medical Service, and related committees, wrote annual reports on plague from 1902 that were ‘an unrivalled storehouse of information concerning’ plague; Dr Bulstrode, the medical inspector of the board who wrote up a detailed summary of events in the ‘Report on suspected pneumonic and bubonic plague in East Suffolk and on the prevalence of plague in rodents in Suffolk and Essex’, wrote reports and papers on suspected cases of human plague in east Suffolk and on an epizootic plague in rodents (1911); and Dr Martin, then director of the Lister Institute, who led the investigation, had previously been chair of the Advisory Committee of the India Office on Plague. There was a high level of cooperation at the institutional level, as this suggests. The Lister Institute both received samples for testing and sent staff to Suffolk to examine the rats and ‘their special flea parasites’. The significance of the event can be gauged from the fact that because some local authorities and occupiers of property were less active or cooperative than others, the Local Government Board, with advice from the Board of Agriculture, issued an order giving power to, and requiring, the local sanitary authorities to exterminate the rats and prevent them from entering property. As a result of this inter-agency and nationally directed activity, the outbreak was contained.Footnote ³⁴

What is most striking about this process, however, and worthy of focus here, is the renewed attention paid by these largely urban experts to the rats and the precise nature of the risk posed by their behaviour in the countryside, not just in town or port. Though in 1910 the subject of rat ‘destruction’, as it was framed at the time, was not deemed by Parliament to be a matter for direct or centralised state intervention, it was not so much the arrival of plague, or even the discovery of plague-carrying fleas on rats (who were already subject to control on ships in ports because of the third pandemic), but the particular risk posed to human health by the potential movement of the animals travelling around rural areas, that escalated the issue to the national level and resulted in a newly focused re-visioning of the rat. As stated by Lord Lamington, sharing knowledge of rat behaviour based on his experience in India as governor of the ‘plague-infected city of Bombay’ from 1903 to 1907, in the debate recorded at the time in Hansard, a ‘rat does not confine its operations to the district of one local authority. That is the whole danger’.Footnote ³⁵ And this alone was enough to necessitate a new, centralized and later legislated approach to rat control: the limit of a specific rat law was an effect of suddenly paying new lab-centred attention to rats and rat conduct, that law grounded in the discourse of disease and control.

It was quickly discovered that the 1910 Suffolk plague outbreak was due to the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), which largely replaced the black rat (Rattus rattus) in Europe from the mid-eighteenth century: no black rats were discovered in 1910 in Suffolk, a point that was periodically reiterated long after the event.Footnote ³⁶ The black or ship rat climbs into lofts and lives in houses in close contact with human beings, and the brown rat prefers to keep its distance by burrowing and living in tunnels. It is probable that black rats, present in Great Britain at least from the Roman period, were never numerous on farms, though they are still found in some port cities, while brown rats introduced in the 1720s only became a nuisance from the late eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁷ But during the period in question and then during the First World War and the interwar period, all rats (black and brown) became characterized as noticeably un-English. Though many accounts were at pains to distinguish between the two and their histories, the rat, a homogenized threatening invasive ‘menace’ when associated with plague, or in wartime, highlighted as ever the qualities that the nation sought to deny or escape, added to by the allegorical use of rat images in which the rat (used in one cartoon as a rather pathetic-looking victim of the healthy British bulldog) was equated with the enemy.Footnote ³⁸

After nine years, in 1919, just after the end of the First World War, Lord Aberconway then framed his introduction to the second reading of his Rat Destruction Bill within the House of Lords, as being crucial at the national level to post-war reconstruction. This was, he said, because of property damage, but, at least for the purposes of rhetoric, he still stressed the identification of rats as carriers of ‘plague bacillus’. Harnessing the interest of the Lords as agriculturalists, alongside the threat of plague, he drew on the effectiveness of the 1910 response, and argued that scientists, bacteriologists, farmers and agricultural societies supported him. The public interest was, he argued, endangered not only because of the health risks (in fact, he referred to them as ‘these plague carriers’), but also by the rats’ well-known impact on agriculture and therefore on the country's food supplies (eating roots, grain, seed corn and hens’ eggs, and attacking young birds and animals), and damage to infrastructure (he suggested that rats had been responsible for gas explosions by eating through lead, much as they have been said more recently to cause 50 per cent of farm fires by eating through electrical insulationFootnote ³⁹ ). In Norfolk, Suffolk or Hampshire, Aberconway said,

In Aberconway's speech, the rat, taking on human characteristics in its vocalizations, attacked modern farming; it undermined, at night, the most civilized of England's agricultural processes. Such a statement (particularly following directly as it did from the second reading of the Anglo-French Treaty (Defence of France) Bill) was enormously evocative of the technologies of trench warfare. Even so, in supporting the reading the House of Lords referred to the work done in Belgium, Denmark and Germany to control rats. A similar British response at the national level was in their view the only way to tackle the rats’ literal, but also unpatriotic, ‘migratory’, ‘nomadic’ and ‘predatory’ habits: the rat escaped national boundaries. In reply, Lord Ernle, the president of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, stated that the debate, with the reading, ‘assists us very largely in creating a proper public atmosphere’ for the government to propose its own bill. As such, and also building, as environmental historian John Sheail has argued, on the First World War food conservation campaign,Footnote ⁴¹ it had cross-party support.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, in the face of food conservation, the focus on the disease-carrying capacity of rural rats largely fell away. Despite occasional reference to their capacity to carry disease, as in the 1950s MAFF leaflets, the next scientific study addressing the potential of rural rats to carry parasitic species and transmit zoonotic diseases, despite the cultural associations, was published in 1995 by J.P. Webster and D.W. Macdonald (members of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, University of Oxford). Webster and Macdonald found that each of 510 brown rats live-trapped on eleven UK farms tested positive for, simultaneously, two to nine potentially zoonotic parasites each. On the basis of their study, which showed that the rats were implicated in the spread of zoonotic disease among humans and livestock in rural areas, they recommended ‘veterinarians and farmers should be aware of the disease risk that rat infestations may present to both themselves and their livestock, and more effort should be made to control the rat carriers’.Footnote ⁴³ From the Second World War until 1995, however, the country rat featured as it had in the early modern period, principally as a threat to human food production or stores, and as an economic problem to be controlled through quantification.

Figure 2. ‘Black and white photograph of wheat rick in bad condition, with a rat run’, Farmers’ Weekly (1940), Eric Guy, courtesy of MERL.

Rat destruction/rat control

Fitting into Knight's pest discourse,Footnote ⁴⁴ rats can suddenly appear in great numbers, as testified by a cooper ‘who was pursued by hundreds of rats at dawn one day in Hampshire’ – a tale told to Sir James Wright's bailiff.Footnote ⁴⁵ Wright captures human–rat histories, such as that of the rats which chased a man who shot at ‘a great assemblage of several thousand … progressively going before him’, and the impact of rats pursuing their own livelihoods, though framed by the human response. Not only did rats eat ‘voraciously’, for instance; they also had ‘sagacity’ in view, because, as Wright records, some rats were observed climbing a tree overhanging a stack and dropping onto it from a height of ‘three yards’. It was this type of action that led Wright to design his new ‘pendant frames’ in his Patent Artificial Slate.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, the text also attempts to assess how much economic damage farm rats might do ordinarily, showing that this approach was already extant at the point at which Aberconway spoke. By seeking legitimacy and authority for his product, Wright offers us an example of an emerging form of control through quantification based on observation and comparison, within the discourse of agricultural improvement.

Writing in the 1790s, Wright (who wanted to sell a Patent Artificial Slate he developed for use on haystacks and wheat stacks) relates that a farmer in Sussex, of several hundred acres, killed 450 rats a year, based on his bailiff's reckoning, and he assumes that ‘each rat eats full an ounce of corn a day: I calculate from this position … the barns contain corn ⅓ part of the year, say 120 days, which multiplied by 450, makes 540,000 ounces’. He then works out an estimation of parishes that grow corn and ‘multiply my parish loss by 5,000, and the product will be 2,700,000,000 ounces, which I conceive to be equal to 168,750,000 lbs in weight, which … will make a loss of grain throughout the kingdom of 16,850,000 bushels’, based just on the 450 rats that have been caught, let alone ‘the living ones that evaded his bailiff's traps’. Wright himself argues that rats eat more than an ounce of grain a day, ‘as I procured a half-grown rat, and kept him seven days and a half upon wheat; when he eat eight ounces’. Granted, Wright was not a disinterested observer, as he had a product to sell, but such testimony shows that experiments took place with live farm rats (in which a young farm rat ate grain and produced knowledge) in periods of agricultural improvement before the twentieth century. Wright worked via correspondence, in the style of an eighteenth-century natural scientist, reporting others concerned about the ‘depredations of those voracious animals’ to gain comparative material.

During the 1919 debate the figures provided by Aberconway were questioned, and by this point farmers seemed more concerned about the rather more visible damage being done by rabbits than by rats. However, it is clear from this immediate post-First World War debate that politicians were more than capable of using the capacity of the rat to carry the worst human features to considerable symbolic effect, which resulted in increased rat mortality. When it finally passed into law, having been re-presented by the government and given royal assent on 28 December 1919, the bill became the Rats and Mice (Destruction) Act 1919 (54 & 55 Vict. c. 76), which could result in a fine of five pounds if an occupier failed to act to rid property of rats and mice, though the latter seem to have rarely featured in actual action against vermin. If this was not tackled in the time specified by the local authority, then that authority could recover its expenses for the work. Ships in port were also covered by the law – ships’ captains being treated, by the legislative framework the Act established, as occupiers of land – and there was advice on how to tackle rats in urban as well as rural environments. Rats officers were to be employed to regularize the Rats Order and formally enforce it, and if they were obstructed then occupiers could be fined up to twenty pounds. The press received this with little fanfare, but disseminated the Act's main provisions and recognized that rat catching was to be put on some kind of official footing, which according to a Manchester Guardian article might mean the loss of the picturesque rat catcher. That rat catcher (elevated relative to the Chambers's Journal piece) was ‘a mine of field and wood craft’: instant nostalgia generated a sense of loss and regret, but the rat catcher of old was not modern.Footnote ⁴⁷ What was to be done, as stated in the Manchester Guardian, was all about public communication, not specialization: ‘it is further suggested that the Act should be widely advertised by means of posters giving directions as to the most effective methods to be adopted individually and collectively by those who have rats or mice on their premises’. A ‘draft of a poster’ was therefore provided, which stated that collective action was best, and that dead rats should be destroyed by burning, old baits removed and owners of livestock warned of rat catching in process.Footnote ⁴⁸

In this way, rats and mice became subject to new, formal, legislative controls, but much of the effect of the legislation depended on the ongoing work of rhetoricians and the dissemination of information by local authorities rather than official, specialist agents of rat control.Footnote ⁴⁹ As John Sheail has observed, the aim of the Ministry of Agriculture after the 1919 Act was therefore to engage the general public in the process, not to systematically control rats.Footnote ⁵⁰ The aim was not really to impact in any significant way on the rat population, despite the advice about rat killing, but to raise awareness of the problem and emphasize the shared responsibility of tackling it. This was successful: in the words of Minister of Agriculture Sir Arthur Boscawen in 1921, the ‘necessary anti-rat atmosphere’ had been created by the new Act.Footnote ⁵¹ The actual methods of control, however, remained embedded in the established practices and vernacular knowledges of the rat catchers, framed by the new focus on disease regardless of location.

Government continued to work in raising the profile of the rat during the interwar period in the form of ‘National Rat Week’ (in November), advertised in the press, via posters and through cinemas. In a 1920 Pathé film entitled London – Kill That Rat!, ‘Government asks everyone to assist during Rat Week to exterminate this dirty, disease-carrying, destructive pest’. A similar film made in 1919 had focused on the Borough of Leeds and what was being done there to gas rats, the film itself showing gassing taking place in a rural rather than an urban setting. Local boroughs reported their activities, such as giving out free rat poison and traps, to MAFF, which continued to sponsor the week in rural and urban areas during the Second World War.Footnote ⁵² MAFF set up its own Research (Rat) Laboratory, led by Claremont, who published on the lab's activities in the monthly Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture and presented research findings at the Conference of Rat Officers. Much of that work was dedicated to looking at red squill as a poison that might be presented in a palatable yet long-lasting form to rats, at a lethal dose, without likelihood of causing harm to other animals, including humans. The lab had a ‘factory’ attached, all on ‘the top floor of one of the old blocks at Mount Pleasant Post Office … in what was once part of the Cold Bath Prison’, London, which employed Claremont himself, plus a lab assistant, two men and a boy. A slightly ramshackle and evidently low-road affair, there was equipment in the lab ‘so far as funds permit’, and ‘mixing machines, a dough brake, and biscuit cutter … a large gas-fired oven [and] a percolator’ in the factory.Footnote ⁵³ As the rationale for its establishment was at least in part that some government departments had rat infestations, the potential humour of the proposition was clear: Hansard records two rather facetious questions directed at Boscawen, and Sir H. Brittain asked if his office files relating to the topic had been eaten by rats.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, the government rats had in effect employed the men and caused equipment to be bought.

The aim in instances such as this was to ‘destroy’ rats, i.e. eradicate them in their entirety, consistent with the new statutory framework, and the attempt produced new (if adapted) experimental environments, jobs and publications, such as Claremont's A Practical Handbook on Rat Destruction (Rodent and Insect Pests Destruction Co., 1926) still being promoted by MAFF ten years later.Footnote ⁵⁵ But during the interwar period, attempts were also made in Britain to use rat skins for profit, a remaking or recoding of rat bodies rather than erasure, which, as the then parliamentary secretary to the Board of Agriculture, Sir A. Boscawen, said, might create a market and therefore ‘serve an additional incentive to rat destruction’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Proposed uses, discussed in 1921, included ‘the manufacture of gloves for motor drivers’ and also ‘slippers’. Boscawen was reluctant to see this as a viable commercial prospect, but when pressed said, ‘we are taking every possible step to place the use of rat skins on a commercial basis’.Footnote ⁵⁷

In fact, there was a precedent: the New York Times had reported in 1897 that rat skins made ‘a very durable leather, and are used a good deal’ in America, ‘much of it masquerading as kid … There are dealers who make as many as 20,000 pairs of rat skin gloves a year, and a very good business it is’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The same was done with other animals considered to be vermin, such as the ‘gutter cats’ in New York City in 1920 when the demand for cheap furs escalated; reputedly the use of their pelts resulted in a marked drop in numbers of an animal that was considered a public nuisance, a piece of data that ecologist Colin Matheson found useful when seeking to estimate the ‘statistics of stray cats’ twenty years later.Footnote ⁵⁹ In other words, the aim was to turn what was by definition a useless creature to some human purpose and thereby hedge it around with an economic value. This was despite the fact that, because of the cultural associations of the rat, it was still necessary to pass the rat leather off as something else for this to be commercially viable.

At the start of the Second World War, rats came to be characterized less as a disease carrier (new though this image was) and picked up again the old early modern ‘vermin’ mantle of threat to food production, because of damage to animal feed, stored grain and crops waiting for threshing – delayed threshing caused by labour shortages resulted in higher rat populations. As a result, a rats order (no 866) was issued in June 1940 (along with similar orders re rabbits, rooks and wood pigeons) to enable the County War Agricultural Executive Committees to destroy rats.Footnote ⁶⁰ As John Sheail has argued, the approach to rat control then began to move onto a more empirical footing as rats became a subject of study for the Bureau of Animal Population, who, as a result of systematic observation of rat populations, argued for a much more methodical approach to the problem that would tackle rural and urban districts and seaports.

If we look back to the 1910 approach we can in fact see that the ideas about how best to manage rats through scientific investigation had already emerged before the Great War, while ideas about systematic control across rural and urban areas and the ports are present in less directed form in the 1919 Act, if only dominant from the Second World War. Taking the established need for national direction on board, the Ministry of Food therefore started to operate a Directorate of Infestation Control in 1943, which involved local authorities. The County War Agricultural Executive Committees also began to organize rural rat and mouse control more formally with the help of additional specialist pest officers; the Women's Land Army trained rat catchers who went out to the farms which commissioned them, the work promoted by the local press; and by 1945 Agriculture, the Ministry of Agriculture's journal, was encouraging farmers to take out rodent control contracts with the County War Agricultural Executive Committees in order to clear whole areas of rats.Footnote ⁶¹

As rural rat destruction moved ever further from associations with disease and towards more pressing, if early modern, fears about access to reliable food supplies, so ecologist Charles Elton and his team became crucial.Footnote ⁶² The Bureau of Animal Population was established in 1932 at Oxford University under Elton, who had had previous experience of investigating rodents such as voles and wood mice, and hedgehogs, in rural areas, thanks to earlier funding from the Empire Marketing Board from 1927 or 1928 to 1931.Footnote ⁶³ In his Introduction to Elton's Animal Ecology (1927), Julian S. Huxley had provided the example of the periodic rise and fall of ‘plagues of mice, rats and other rodents’ as a typical example of ‘periodicity in numbers, which is perfectly normal for many of the smaller mammals’. During the height of the plague ‘remedial measures are called for locally, and large sums of money may be spent’. Once the numbers collapse, those who set about ‘the anti-rodent campaign claim the disappearance of the pest as a victory for their methods’. But this is nothing to do with the ‘killing off of the animals by man’, which ‘either had no effect’ or managed the numbers in such a way as to delay the ‘crisis’ and therefore prolong the plague. Only speeding up the epidemic crisis, reducing reproduction, or addressing the ‘ecological status of the species’ would have any real impact.Footnote ⁶⁴ This quantative understanding of populations formed the backdrop to the bureau's work under the umbrella of the Agricultural Research Council. They undertook a number of surveys and trials and published reports on the most effective means of baiting on the basis of the earlier work, and examination of rat behaviour. Rat poisons were analysed and studied for their effectiveness, and by observing rats closely they discovered how to condition the rat to take poisoned bait to greatest effect. At the end of the war they published a definitive methodology for the practice of rodent control based on their research findings, the three-volume The Control of Rats and Mice (published by the Clarendon Press). Edited by D. Chitty and H.N. Southern, the reach of these volumes is indicated by a valedictory description, on Elton's retirement in 1968, as ‘the model for such work all over the world’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Following the Second World War, and the Agriculture Act 1947,Footnote ⁶⁶ the 1919 Rats and Mice (Destruction) Act was replaced in England and Wales by the Prevention of Damage by Pests Act 1949 (12 & 13 Geo. 6. Ch. 55).Footnote ⁶⁷ In the wake of the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, at Hot Springs, Virginia in 1943, which emphasized the urgent necessity of distributing, increasing and re-establishing food production after the war,Footnote ⁶⁸ the new Act aimed to tackle insects and other pest organisms as well as rats and mice, to preserve whatever food the UK had produced. It offered farmers the option of contracting pest destruction services through the county executive committees, a system much like the wartime processes that they would have become used to using. While stepping back in practice from centralized government planning and control, the Prevention of Damage by Pests Act 1949 nonetheless required local authorities to keep the number of rats and mice as low as possible, in sewers as well as above ground, and gave local authorities the power to require landowners and occupiers of land to take action in the destruction, and in keeping land free, of rodents in particular (though ‘infestation’ referred to ‘rats, mice, insects or mites in numbers’ in food in particular, which reflected the overarching agenda).

Under the terms of the new Act, the state ensured that local authorities provided training to rat catchers and to sanitary inspectors, kept records, wrote reports and undertook research into dealing with rats and mice.Footnote ⁶⁹ By this point, the bureaucratic and quantitative processes had become entangled in the chemical and physical processes of modern rat control, as the figures cited for justification for it and as proof that it was being carried out were discussed in the popular press and in the House of Commons. When disseminating information about the new Act at the time of publication, the Manchester Guardian stated that rats and mice caused the loss of around 2,000,000 tons of food annually.Footnote ⁷⁰ By 1952 it was reported in the House of Commons that the Ministry of Agriculture employed 1,104 people in England and Wales in connection with catching rats, with 979 of these employed ‘in actually catching rats’.Footnote ⁷¹ The Department of Agriculture for Scotland reported providing local authorities with £21,722 in grants, and that it had carried out 49,690 inspections, which revealed 13,044 infestations. The total operation was small relative to the whole of its budget, and also small compared to its interest in rabbit destruction, through the emerging use of myxomatosis,Footnote ⁷² yet the wider shift to a public and official focus on rat control as a subject worthy of observation, and a necessary element of state work, produced knowledge (seen in posters, leaflets, articles, films), organizations, conferences, employment, legislation, technical language, labs and new or adapted material culture (traps, building designs, materials, poisons). These were the discursive trappings of institutions all dependent on the farm rat, and the figures offer an echo of the presence of farm rats in rural areas.

Studying rats and cats

After the war, to maintain an influence, researchers and consultants like Charles Elton who worked in new disciplines had to be, and were, pragmatic about the socio-economic, cultural and political context in which they operated. In fact, Elton's scientific policy work fed into the development of nature conservancy post-war.Footnote ⁷³ And the use made of the bureau's data set provides an interesting case study of the ways in which the emerging discourse of agricultural productivity became woven into scientific work, especially the emergent field of animal ethology, and the ways in which other animals became drawn into post-war models of labour. One paper, ‘The use of cats in farm rat control’, in the British Journal of Animal Behaviour, reveals that Elton (drawing on the work of the late Dr G. Dunkin, first director of the Agricultural Research Station at Compton from 1937 until his death in 1942),Footnote ⁷⁴ sought to determine the value of predators, not just poisons, in rat control by analysing field studies that had been carried out during the war under the Agricultural Research Council on several of its mixed, dairy and pig farms. These studies, which counted numbers of cats and rats in specific locations, across two to three seasons from 1939/1940 to 1942, with additional data from 1943 and through to 1945, revealed that cats could be effective in rat control, but that their influence was highly localized; barns, ricks and cottage gardens more than about 230 metres away from cats might contain tens or even hundreds of rats. Rats, it noted, this time were generally controlled using poisoned bait, sometimes gassing, ‘break-back’ traps and ‘block control campaigns’, but Elton's study showed that they could also be controlled around farm buildings (though not in fields) through human-directed predation. In the case of large infestations, cat control had to wait until the rats had been cleared in their entirety by poison. This was explained by the rats entering a rat-free territory patrolled by cats being placed at high risk through not knowing the cover, whereas established colonies would be in balance with the cats in terms of knowledge and experience, something borne out by more recent studies suggesting that cats prefer to predate smaller rats, possibly because they are easier to catch (younger and more naive). The cats also needed to be ‘anchored’ by feeding just enough (milk) to keep them on the farm, though not so much as to leave them with no interest in patrolling. But the number of cats was deemed by Elton to be more important than their ratting quality, and he believed that cats could be very effective at controlling rats.Footnote ⁷⁵

In the study as eported by Elton in 1953 it was therefore determined that it ‘would seem best … to regard cats as a useful source of additional farm labour … [given] a general shortage of skilled labour’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The interest for the Bureau of Animal Population therefore lay first and foremost with the rat and the cat and the ways in which they interacted. But by adopting the emerging farmwork study methodologies of the period,Footnote ⁷⁷ and agricultural economics,Footnote ⁷⁸ to interpret the data collected during the wartime field studies of rat populations, in an effort to assess and analyse all aspects of traditional farm rat control, the final paper also ultimately assessed the relative costs involved and the efficiency of using cats as compared to human beings to control vermin. Farm cats were evaluated for their efficiency as well as efficacy in terms of relative successes/skills, long-term impact, costs in food and labour (calories consumed, transport, fees) and (adopted from the new farmwork studies approaches) the psychological aspects of the work for the cat and the human labourer. The net effect was to present the cat in conclusion as ‘a useful and efficient source of additional labour’Footnote ⁷⁹ in the same way that all other labour on the farm (horse, manual and mechanical) was accounted for at the time. Alongside the application of husbandry within post-war nature conservation,Footnote ⁸⁰ we therefore also see the increasing reach of the discourse of labour efficiency in the immediate post-war period, which went far beyond the advisory economists: rats, cats and labourers could all be surveyed and formally evaluated by anyone seeking to make their work useful to farmers after the Agriculture Act of 1947. It also suggests that animals other than those species farmed as livestock were occasionally captured within the thinking that underpinned post-war reorganization and the mechanization of farmwork. Though there was one letter to the Lancet in 1907 that suggested, on the basis of enumeration and careful observation, that cats could be used to keep rats down and therefore reduce the incidence of plague in India, the cats in this case were evaluated as an established capital associated with higher castes,Footnote ⁸¹ rather than as labourers, so this was a novel approach and very much part of a new way of thinking about labour of all kinds. And, in this instance, if unsurprisingly given that the paper was published in the British Journal of Animal Behaviour edited by Julian Huxley and William H. Thorpe, the subjective experience of labour (cat or human) also remained in play, the cat in effect rewritten as part of the technology of the farm.Footnote ⁸²

Post-war ‘control’

After the Second World War, Turnbull et al. have demonstrated that the move to higher levels of intensive production, and also more chemical application than before c.1940, impacted on the degree of biodiversity in European agricultural systems.Footnote ⁸³ The effects of these changes are complicated by the fact that some (wild) species within the farmed landscape have co-evolved with farming and are therefore dependent on specific practices within it. As Turnbull et al. state, ‘some species … in Europe where farming has been an integral part of the landscape for thousands of years, thrive in extensively managed farmland and are clearly threatened by agricultural intensification’.Footnote ⁸⁴ When it comes to the species affected – be they pollinators, producers, herbivores or predators – Winqvist et al. suggest that it is also clear that they are normally considered to be an ‘integral part of the European cultural landscape, and their loss has provoked both public and political outcry’.Footnote ⁸⁵ By the 1960s, scientists working in the fields of ecology and entomology in America and Canada began to look at the use of what came to be called ‘biological controls’ in farming and the mixing and matching of these with the use of synthetic chemical control as ‘integrated control’.Footnote ⁸⁶ But according to Camilla Winqvist et al., increased homogeneity and reduced landscape complexity (with a proportionally lower number of arable fields nearby) due to increased agricultural specialization has reduced the effectiveness of biological controls.Footnote ⁸⁷ Following the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962 in the USA, 1963 in Britain), these debates fed into the public and political arenas,Footnote ⁸⁸ just as Ruth Harrison's Animal Machines (1964) was to do two years later with intensification.Footnote ⁸⁹ From the point of view of farmers and agriculture's subsidiary industries, such debates created potential legal, perceptual and methodological complexities, yet also opportunities as new markets for organic products opened up.

The officially sanctioned, promoted and legislated management of vermin in the UK after the war fell within this same Europe-wide framework for the promotion of more homogenized, intensive agricultural production. That method was characterized as ‘modern’, and in this case modern meant clean, pristine and hygienic, while specialization of necessity relied on a number of interwoven technologies to work.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the UK as elsewhere, intensive livestock and poultry production therefore emphasized the need to keep the animals and birds free from disease and predation. As Gray stated in Diseases of Poultry, hygiene and sanitation ‘will preserve a bird in complete health and secure its maximum output’. ‘Even if the stock is healthy and sound’, he continued, ‘it is a living thing, and though … intensive methods of rearing may increase the output … the effect upon their tissues is to reduce their health and seriously impair the vitality of the strain. Knowledge of the principles of hygiene and sanitation will prevent this’.Footnote ⁹¹ The idea that animals should not be pushed too hard existed before Animal Machines,Footnote ⁹² but support for this farming method included arguments that it was actually better for the farm animals housed in these systems because they were protected by them.

No one can see the world from the hen's point of view, W.P. Blount had argued in Hen Batteries, but the experienced poultry farmer could recognize the sounds that the hens make to express ‘contentment or dissatisfaction’; the calls that he had heard, Blount said, were all representative of ‘cheerful and inquisitive’, i.e. happy, birds.Footnote ⁹³ That contentment was grounded in the idea of preventive welfare secured by progress and evidenced by the physiological response of the birds (good health). It is in fact clear from the outset of the debate about intensification that many farmers and veterinarians themselves laid claim to a genuine interest in the well-being of stock, on the basis that animals in industrialized modern agricultural systems were protected from the vagaries of nature – including illness, food shortages and attack by their own kind and/or other animals.Footnote ⁹⁴ Rats were well known to tunnel underneath chicken coops outdoors, where ratting dogs could be set to catch them.Footnote ⁹⁵ Particular forms of farming generate particular forms of infestation control, and both rats and mice became subject to more systematic forms of control as a result of intensification.

However, though few commentators mourned the loss of rats, attempts to control them as vermin did impact on high-value species and cause an outcry. In the case of poisonous applications in vermin ‘control’, these brought their own risks for the human user and livestock, not just the rats. As already indicated, some forms of ‘control’ could cause illness and injury to livestock and be a cause of occupational illness for farmers and farm workers. In its fourteenth edition, Fream's observed, for example, that on ‘many farms, poisonous substances are in routine use and may be accidentally eaten by stock with disastrous results’.Footnote ⁹⁶ By the end of the nineteenth century, in parallel with the emergence and provision of technical agricultural education in Britain, which it was believed at the time had lagged behind other European states, Fream's was the first British general agricultural textbook, published as William Fream's Elements of Agriculture: A Text Book (1892). Nicholas Goddard has shown that, with a Preface that cited the scientific expertise of Miss Ormerod and Dr Voelker,Footnote ⁹⁷ it quickly became, as hoped, a standard work. It sold over 20,000 copies in its first year and ran through several reprints on first publication and subsequently continued through multiple editions and revisions to the end of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹⁸

Through a text like Fream's, we can observe subtle changes and continuities in agricultural practice. Standard texts like this, and books of animal husbandry in the same scientific and technical tradition, often described the symptoms caused by various forms of rat poison, alongside the symptoms of over- or incorrect feeding, disease and injury in livestock. The hazard had become more commonplace in the 1940s, as the use of poisoned baits increased. Hence another standard text of the period, Ernest Gray's Diseases of Poultry (first edition 1940), observed that the ‘increased use of vermin baits since the war has been responsible for some heavy losses among flocks which accidentally consumed them’. And he highlighted arsenic and phosphorus as key rat poisons.Footnote ⁹⁹ Gray also described what he called ‘vegetable poisons’, which were also put out for rats – ‘ground nux vomica seeds’ that led to strychnine poisoning. However, though he detailed the symptoms of poisoning, and suggested sending the carcasses for testing, presumably to prevent recurrences, he did not see treatment of the individual bird as ‘an economic proposition’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At this point, the new economies of scale for wartime food production had already begun to emerge among the audience for this type of advice, and this thinking continued after the war.

Textbooks like this and Fream's provide us with a vivid insight into the changing animal management and wider farming practices of their day. Adverts for rodenticides in farmer's periodicals like Farmer & Stockbreeder, or Farmer's Weekly, along with illustrated articles, promoted the latest techniques and services as efficient (building on post-war labour studies and accounting). With slogans such as ‘science defeats the rat’, the effects of a product like Ratero seem almost implacable and certain to benefit the farmer.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But while each practice continued, as it did despite the advertising and publication of new advice, the specialist literature had to highlight the possible (accidental) consequences of all the old methods alongside descriptions of emerging issues. We therefore see Leonard Robinson, in Modern Poultry Husbandry, explaining,

In the texts that describe the latest farming methods, through warning and the identification of danger we find incidental traces of the pre-existing, commonplace and preferred methods in use.

As told in his account of the process for the heart journal Circulation, Karl Paul Link and his team at the University of Wisconsin developed Warfarin in an effort, on and off from 1942 onwards, to produce a rat poison derived from the active agent of naturally occurring anticoagulants in badly cured clover hay. The hay had been brought to him in 1933 by a farmer whose cattle were haemorrhaging due to this ‘sweet clover disease’. The substance was patented in 1948 in the USA by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and Warfarin (3-phenylacetyl ethyl 4-hydroxycoumarin) was registered and launched as a rodent poison in America in 1948. Similar compounds and agents were also being developed in Europe at the same time and these led Link to also experiment further with Warfarin for clinical purposes in the treatment of (human) heart disease in 1949 and 1950, despite some initial debate among researchers and clinicians about its efficacy.Footnote ¹⁰³ By 1951 Warfarin was a commonplace in American agriculture, and by 1957 it had been widely adopted by American farmers.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In Britain Warfarin was also quickly adopted as a rodenticide and was subsequently tested on grey squirrels.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Despite statements in texts such as Robinson's, and though Link argued at the time that it was ‘the safest rodenticide known’ for human users,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ it gradually became clear that Warfarin had to be used carefully on and off the farm to avoid harming other species. In addition, Warfarin came to be used so widely to control rodent populations that by the late 1960s and the 1970s resistance had begun to develop in rats and mice throughout Great Britain. The physiological response of the rodents, co-evolving to address human control, was studied in the UK in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin. Ecological field studies were undertaken in Wales, and a second generation of anticoagulant rodenticides was developed in the lab and via field trials by ‘chemical and pharmaceutical companies and in collaboration with the World Health Organization’, shaped by rat behaviour and response to human predation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In essence, the history of rat control was reprised in these studies. As before, when rat populations were studied across the UK, rats were found to inhabit farmland and farm buildings in the South East, the East Midlands and the East of England, with the highest populations in buildings housing cereals and on land growing ‘cereals, and root, fodder and vegetable crops’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This was exactly as it was in the 1919 Parliamentary debate, which suggests that for the rat new farming methods and mechanization had had little impact, though intensive poultry farmers were finding that poultry houses offered particularly favourable conditions for mice. Mice therefore emerged as a more significant problem under intensive production, i.e. they became a significant pest for farmers because of the mode of production, not because they had changed. Within other parts of the sector, as a form of pest control they were said to be a useful animal. For example, it was observed in the fifteenth edition of Fream's in 1972 that mice could help arable and horticultural farmers, and fruit producers. ‘Mice’, Fream's stated, ‘voles, shrews and hedgehogs, together with reptiles, lizards, frogs and toads also play a part in keeping down the numbers of insects’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In its descriptions of pests and disease Fream's captures the way in which farming still had a very complex profile throughout this period.