Joe Shute

They may be general mischief makers, but there's great potential we might coexist together more peacefully in the future.

I have personal experience of waking up day one without rats because for a number of years I had a colony of four pet rats.

And the great tragedy of having rats as pets is they have quite short lives between two and three years old.

And gradually they died off.

And on the day that the last one died, there was just this silence and a sense of bereavement that we had.

It really opened my eyes to the inner lives of rats.

They love playing hide and seek.

And they don't just do it for treats, but they will go and scamper off and come back, and the reward is that they're tickled.

And they giggle, these kind of hypersonic frequencies which are inaudible to the human ear.

When they finally died, we were left with a house without rats, if not a world, and it was a sad place.

It's on these intensive farms where the natural ecosystem that was there has been eradicated for massive food production.

And you have a monoculture that's a sort of playground for rats where there's just one constant food source that they can go at.

There's been interesting studies done.

If you have wilder landscapes and wilder types of farming,

that naturally reduces rat populations because you have much more of their predators around.

Well, if you want a world without rats, then yes, I went there and they have border patrols that patrol the border of eastern Alberta.

And it's the only way that rats can get into the province.

And they have hats that say Rat Patrol.

And we went out in their Jeeps as well, which also branded on the side.

And they have blocks of warfarin or whichever anticoagulant bait they use and shotguns as well.