New York podcaster hails rat-free Alberta for doing `the impossible'

Alberta's battle to remain rat-free has been waged for more than 70 years.

The first rats began to show up at the Alberta-saskatchewan border in 1950, after arriving on the East Coast of North America from Europe. It took them 30 years to move across Saskatchewan and reach the eastern border of Alberta. By the time they did, the province was prepared.

“We saw the rats coming,” Karen Wickerson, who runs Alberta's rat control program, told Ira Glass on this week's episode of This American Life, a New York-based Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast that's focused on Canada just a handful of times over its nearly 30-year history. “And so we're able to mobilize and be ready for when they arrived.”

Alberta's history with rats, or lack thereof, is a feat that hasn't been replicated anywhere else in the world. It's a reality that would be impossible for most New Yorkers to imagine, Glass says.

In Alberta's early stages of rat eradication, Wickerson said education was key. Public campaigns illustrated the threat the rodents posed to agriculture, including putting taxidermied rats in all the local field offices, just so Albertans “could see what a rat actually looked like.”

Around that time, it was common to find about 600 infestations a year in the rat control zone, an area that's about 30 kilometres wide and runs north to south along the Saskatchewan border for a distance of nearly 500 kilometres.

About 250 pest control officers were employed at that time, a number that has since dwindled to 13 as the province now deals with just a few infestations a year.

Officers and local farmers patrol area farms for signs of the vermin.

“We're usually in and out in just a few minutes, look around some bales of barley or oats, open doors to steel grain bins. The fact that we find zero rats, that's typical,” Glass says, as he rides along with rat inspector Jory Hoffman.

Hoffman adds that the odd infestation is discovered about once every two years.

“This is the dirty secret of the world's most effective rat control program — they have done such a good job that at this point, it's kind of boring,” Glass says.

The rat control zone is not the only area they have to worry about, however. Rats can, and do, enter Alberta on vehicles and aircraft. If an Albertan suspects they've spotted a rat, they are instructed to contact Wickerson's office.

Wickerson, who has an email folder with hundreds of possible rat sightings, tells Glass that most of the time she receives false reports. Muskrats, in particular, are commonly spotted instead. “If you've lived in Alberta your whole life, you've never seen a rat. So identifying it is pretty hard.”

Of 408 reports received last year, 27 turned out to be rats. Some of those positive reports included friends and family passing on information about individuals who brought a rat into the province as a pet, which is illegal under the province's Agricultural Pests Act.

Alberta's success in remaining rat-free costs the province about $360,000 annually, according to Glass, but their efforts are estimated to save the province tens of millions of dollars a year in potential damage to infrastructure and crops.

But the province's success with rat eradication doesn't mean it doesn't have other pests to worry about. Richardson's Ground Squirrels, commonly called gophers, are particularly troublesome.

Unlike Norway or roof rats, gophers are native and too far gone at this point to be eradicated.

“So what are you going to do? Like rats in New York, you can kill a few thousand here or there, but they 're not going away. Even in a province that's done the impossible, some things are truly impossible.”