Joe Shute
speaker
145 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 25 Jul
Joe Shute’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
People don't think of squirrels in the same light.
rats do bite people and particularly children can be particularly vulnerable to rat bites.
I visited a series of villages in Tanzania seeing how people in kind of rural areas were coexisting with rats and interviewed a series of villagers who were being bitten by rats on an almost nightly basis and they were quite nightmarish
interviews to listen to actually and it was the reason why children are vulnerable is they will often go to bed with kind of sort of food on their hands and on their faces and that would attract rats in and rats would kind of sniff that and lick and then occasionally bite as well
It's something when housing in kind of Western cities was of a much poorer quality than we see today.
It's something that would occasionally happen as well.
When you look at other animals that people are much more comfortable with, for example, dogs or cats, and when you compare hospital data on those, which I have done in the UK,
And the number of dogs and cat bites is in the millions.
And the number of rat bites is on, you could count them, on a few people's hands.
So they do bite, but much less than other animals.
Yes, there is one very interesting exception to that rule in North America, in Alberta, which if you look at a map of rat distribution around the world, the red indicates rats and it is absolutely painted red.
But there is this one tiny white corner
which is the province of Alberta.
And since the 1940s, the provincial government there have essentially been waging war on rats.
And because of the unique geography of Alberta, there's only one real border where rats can get into, which is an 800 mile stretch of border with the neighbouring province of Saskatchewan.
And the authorities there in the 40s took the view that it would be cheaper to protect Albertan agriculture to have a series of government rat patrols that patrol the border and they're armed with poison and guns and they will wipe out any rat that they see on site.
wow it was so interesting when it launched this thing it was launched with a real sort of propaganda campaign and i visited the provincial archives there where they have the original rat posters that were put out and they were real kind of the kind of nightmarish idea of the rat was really sort of emphasizing anyone who saw a rat was was was encouraged to kill it on site and report it as well
And these rat patrols are still going today.
I joined one of them and we drove around in a pickup truck with rat patrol stamped on the sides and investigating the farms of Alberta for any signs of rat activity.
They do it a few times a year.
Showing 41–60 of 145 · page 3 of 8
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