"One mayor refused to cooperate because he thought the program was a distraction cooked up by the ruling United Conservative Party."
The UCP was established in 2017 and has no relation to the Social Credit Party that controlled Alberta's legislature during the time period being spoken of.
Saying "no relation" is almost stretching it a bit. I kinda give hats off to someone for the slipup. It's not the same legal entity but there's a continuous ideological (and even personal) connection going all the way back.
The way I see it ... Peter Lougheed through Getty and (arguably Stelmach era) was a bit of a brief interruption. His urban, pragmatic PCs pushed the older rural, evangelical Socreds out of power in the 70s.. but that populist movement just went briefly into a (vaguely) outsider status, organized through Alberta Report, etc got into Klein's cabinet, found a national voice in Preston Manning's Reform Party, and returned provincially via the Wildrose Party, and finally triumphally recaptured the province under the banner of the UCP
So not legally the same part, but frankly just really the same minus all the weird fixation on currencies, banks, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (... so far!)
> But it was easy to prove warfarin was safe: a pest control officer held a series of local meetings where he ate warfarin-treated rolled oats while discussing rat control.
Got to love those live demos. Eating rat poison in front of the audience to prove it is safe!
Is it only the dose? I think I read somewhere that rodents are especially vulnerable to this substance for some genetic reason. To lazy to check again. Not to lazy to pronounce my ignorance in a comment. Oh my.
I think they meant, for humans, the dose makes the poison. We would have to eat a very large amount of warfarin to have trouble. Rats get hurt from a small amount.
Poison is dose dependent, but the actual dose dependency is different between species.
I mean, however close we might treat them as, they're still fundamentally diferent
animals
Since they can't throw up or burp, something that produces enough gas (More than a regular soda) could in theory kill a rat, but just make a human slightly inconvenienced, or on the same idea, you could wrap the poisson on an emetic agent to make it safer while not affecting the rat at all
Metabolic rate. The canary doesnt die fast because it is genetically sensitive. It dies fast because a birds metabolic rate is like a firecracker compared to ours.
Maybe I’m just lucky but I’ve lived in Ontario (in cities and the country) and have never seen a rat here. I know they exist but it’s not like we’re inundated by them. Maybe some specific businesses have problems with them, but it’s not something you see every day.
I also lived in Montreal and did see them there sometimes. This was always early morning when I was out running - did not see them in Toronto, Ottawa, etc under similar conditions.
Edit based on reading some other comments: I have seen lots of coyotes and foxes so maybe that explains fewer rats. I know Montreal has coyotes but I’ve never seen them there and where I was there were also squirrels everywhere suggesting fewer predators.
I live in Ottawa and I watched a crow rip a dead brown rat apart in my front street this week. I don’t see them often but they’re here. (I swear I live in a nice neighbourhood)
There are certainly rats in Hamilton and Toronto; and I had the misfortune of dealing with them in my home at one point. They ate through (or under) the crawl space, and they would eat through anything we tried to store food in.
Unlike the sibling though I couldn't claim a nice neighborhood, it was near a soy processing factory.
I care about the Lyme more than the rats tbh. That is way more likely to fuck you up long term than anything a rat will bring in this day and age. We aren’t getting the black plague anymore.
A tick bite in alberta? diagnosed lyme? when? seems very unlikely - there are no recorded cases in the 30+ years of tracking of a case of lyme disease from a bite _in alberta_. All from exposure elsewhere
(not to say that alberta will stay that lucky forever)
Possible she wasn't in Alberta when she got the tick bite, I'm not 100% certain. She may have been on a trip to Saskatchewan or something but she lives in Alberta and definitely was diagnosed with lyme disease from a tick bite.
Possible the bite happened elsewhere and just wasn't discovered until she got back home though. She does travel around a bit
this is out of date information unfortunately. With warming climate, the black-legged tick has spread into Alberta and samples have been found with the Lyme disease bacterium.
There are tons of coyotes in Alberta, to the point where my very urban university has had to put up "Be Coyote Smart" signs since they keep showing up on campus. Nobody that I'm aware of is trying to eradicate coyotes here either, aside from the occasional farmer during calving season.
Around here the coyotes eat mice. I'll see a golf ball size blob of crushed bones and fur on the driveway now and then.
A few years ago, a coyote mom with her 5 pups set up shop on my front lawn. She'd keep a weather eye on me, and me on her, and we got along fine. Over the summer, the number of pups dwindled. I saw a severed head of one a ways away, I think it was done by an eagle. I think only 2 survived the summer.
I sometimes see 6 eagles at a time circling overhead. One flew by so close I could have touched its wingtip. Wow!
A bobcat lives nearby. I see his tracks in the snow, and saw him a couple times.
I live well within the Seattle metropolitan area. Isn't it amazing?
This inevitably brings us to the story of the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone, and how they eat the deer which brings back a whole new slew of changes.
Not to be downer, but recent studies have not corroborated those effects.
>One of the most celebrated claims about Yellowstone’s wolves is facing a major challenge. Scientists say the study behind the famous trophic cascade story relied on flawed methods that overstated the ecological impact of wolf recovery. Their reanalysis found no evidence for a dramatic, park-wide surge in willow growth. Instead, the effects appear smaller and vary from place to place.
Is there a word for a popular misconception that nonetheless produces a positive result? The understanding by the public of the effects could be completely wrong, but the reintroduction of wolves and the restoration of Yellowstone are still good things.
don't get me wrong, i'm on team coyote and i keep my cat indoors. i like to listen to them yip at night around here when they've cornered a rabbit or something
but i've seen stories/footage of people's dogs-on-leashes getting attacked and that's a bit scary
Great read. I didn't know how exactly the rats were eradicated from Alberta something I have just heard and taken for granted. Reading the article provided a great overview of how much effort it really took to do it.
I would like to mention that, even though Alberta is rat free, we still have mice that can make your life misreble if they somehow enter your house/office.
Here in Boise Idaho, we are watching the local governments completely fail. We've not had rats here until somewhat recently. The State, County, and cities have all taken a "not our problem" attitude to it and instead of putting in any sort of pest management/eradication programs they've basically just said "good luck everyone".
The Freakonomics podcast did a series on rats and their relationship to cities and humans and talked about Alberta's approach—it was really fascinating, I'd recommend it: https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/sympathy-for-the-rat
Every so often I'll mention online that Alberta has no rats, and inevitably there will be an American responding in absolute disbelief saying I'm full of shit.
I may not live in Alberta, but luckily rats aren't really a thing in my neck of the woods. Travel an hour down the highway and it's a different story.
Also, as an aside, people often don't believe me when I say I've never seen a cockroach before in my life. Not a one. I've seen pictures of em, and I'm pretty sure if I saw one of those things irl I would absolutely shit myself.
"Alberta has no rats" is a bit of a simplification, as the linked article goes into in depth. They do find rat investations (typically) in the border zones, and some sneak through, both wild and domesticated. Due to ongoing management though the statement is true in broad strokes. We have lots of mice and all sorts of ground squirrels (including a ridiculously awesome "museum") but thankfully very few rats.
Canada's shipping ports have had rat infestations for hundreds of years, even up the Great Lakes. DNA studies show that once a local population became established long ago, it defended itself repeatedly from incursions, and carries on. Alberta has no sea ports, so rats hitch rides there on trains, trucks, and in packaging. The scale is much, much smaller, so Alberta is somewhat able to eradicate them.
I spent the first half of my life in Alberta; had never seen a rat nor a cockroach. I moved further east in the country, cockroaches in my first apartment the first week there... and then discovered rats near the waterfront within the month.
My dad and uncles lived near the southern border as kids, would hunt rats by the train station/grain elevator with a .22 back in the 50's & 60's.
> I've seen pictures of em, and I'm pretty sure if I saw one of those things irl I would absolutely shit myself.
I always thought this was interesting (how many people are super scared of cockroaches). I'm absolutely terrified of bugs, I see cockroaches very rarely, and while I wouldn't pet one... They're not too bad? There's tons of bugs that are way scarier. Spiders, house centipedes, camel crickets. And that's just the stuff that actually exists near me. If I encountered an average Australian insect, good God, I'd run screaming. But cockroaches? Eh
I assume it's because cockroaches are associated with filth, and they tend to occur in large numbers. But as individual bugs, on the surface level they're not too bad. (Not "disagreeing" or anything, just think the different perspectives are neat)
I'm aware, I don't kill spiders if I can avoid it. And I know cockroaches are nastier. I just think it's surprising that people are so visually afraid of them, since they're not a very scary-looking bug.
Growing up poor, cock roaches symbolize poverty and the run down sad places I used to live in. I can’t stand them as they bring back bad memories of my childhood.
Cockroaches make me uncomfortable, but I would not say I fear them. As a kid I was the designated person in the family to deal with all manner of bugs and just whatever.
Except for whatever reason, I am absolutely terrified of moths and butterflies. I don't want to be touched by either of those ever and I don't want them inside my house. I can appreciate butterflies are pretty and colourful and all that but I still don't want them to be near me.
For me it's less fear than an instant "I must kill it / get it out of here" feeling. A big spider or centipede gives me a more intense "creepy crawly" shiver but a cockroach is way higher on the disgust scale for some reason.
isn't it kind of moot? there are plenty of other rodents. They fill the gap left by rats. I'm not really sure eliminating all rodents would be a good idea for the ecosystem.
Rats are, to my knowledge, more destructive and spread more disease. Obviously eliminating all rodents would be disastrous for the ecosystem, but rats in particular are an invasive species in North America so eliminating them specifically doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
> Also, as an aside, people often don't believe me when I say I've never seen a cockroach
That one is pretty shocking. When I lived in South Carolina I remember I used to walk this one road late at night. Once it was dark enough I could see them scattering underneath the streetlights on the fucking sidewalk. Reminded me of sidewalk lizards in Florida, but grosser. I live in the Midwest now. I’m just glad they’re smaller here and don’t fly.
I'm told that the nearest city to me "probably" has cockroaches, but I avoid the city like the plague so no roach encounters for me thus far. I'm 30 and have never left the Canadian Maritime provinces in my life, so I guess it makes sense that there's plenty of "normal" things I've never come across.
Alberta of course has rats. Short of being a hermit nation with impassable borders, the alternative is impossible.
But they maintain such a critically low number through aggressive, non-stop actions that we declare it "rat free", though that's a misnomer. Similar to the measles free status doesn't actually mean measles free, but rather that it isn't spreading uncontrolled.
Though as someone who lives in Ontario, I just wanted to add that I've never seen a vermin rat in my life in this province. Not in Toronto or its subways, not on its streets, nor in various other cities throughout the province. I've seen mice, of course, but never rats. I know they exist here, but someone having not experienced them doesn't mean much.
But wild rats are rare. Albertans have grown so unaccustomed to rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of the 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats.
I lived in Chinatown in Toronto (College and Spadina) and I saw a rat the size of a cat running around the inside of a Chinese supermarket around 2am when I was walking around at night during my university years. I also saw smaller rats and roaches running around Chinese restaurants as well.
Alberta has shown us that proper policy incentives can drive meaningful change. Instead of leaving rats to languish in cellars, they created incentives for them to do meaningful work in the provincial government instead.
"One mayor refused to cooperate because he thought the program was a distraction cooked up by the ruling United Conservative Party."
The UCP was established in 2017 and has no relation to the Social Credit Party that controlled Alberta's legislature during the time period being spoken of.
The way I see it ... Peter Lougheed through Getty and (arguably Stelmach era) was a bit of a brief interruption. His urban, pragmatic PCs pushed the older rural, evangelical Socreds out of power in the 70s.. but that populist movement just went briefly into a (vaguely) outsider status, organized through Alberta Report, etc got into Klein's cabinet, found a national voice in Preston Manning's Reform Party, and returned provincially via the Wildrose Party, and finally triumphally recaptured the province under the banner of the UCP
So not legally the same part, but frankly just really the same minus all the weird fixation on currencies, banks, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (... so far!)
All of this off topic from rats. (Maybe?)
Got to love those live demos. Eating rat poison in front of the audience to prove it is safe!
I think they meant, for humans, the dose makes the poison. We would have to eat a very large amount of warfarin to have trouble. Rats get hurt from a small amount.
Poison is dose dependent, but the actual dose dependency is different between species.
Since they can't throw up or burp, something that produces enough gas (More than a regular soda) could in theory kill a rat, but just make a human slightly inconvenienced, or on the same idea, you could wrap the poisson on an emetic agent to make it safer while not affecting the rat at all
I also lived in Montreal and did see them there sometimes. This was always early morning when I was out running - did not see them in Toronto, Ottawa, etc under similar conditions.
Edit based on reading some other comments: I have seen lots of coyotes and foxes so maybe that explains fewer rats. I know Montreal has coyotes but I’ve never seen them there and where I was there were also squirrels everywhere suggesting fewer predators.
Unlike the sibling though I couldn't claim a nice neighborhood, it was near a soy processing factory.
Which means understanding and maintaining these systems is still valuable as even if millions aren’t actively dying, that can change,
My friend got Lyme disease from a tick though so I can't agree with that part
(not to say that alberta will stay that lucky forever)
Possible the bite happened elsewhere and just wasn't discovered until she got back home though. She does travel around a bit
Gophers everywhere though.
this is out of date information unfortunately. With warming climate, the black-legged tick has spread into Alberta and samples have been found with the Lyme disease bacterium.
https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/tick-lyme-diseas...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcp1BfPUeOc
The program is actually called "Predator Free 2050" and also aims to eliminate possums and stoats. No mention is made of Uruk-hai, orcs, or Balrogs.
Aren't they native?
How does a balrog reproduce btw?
On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech, global war on rats (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17821534 - Aug 2018 (1 comment)
On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech war on rats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9540096 - May 2015 (32 comments)
I thought there had been other threads about this but couldn't find them. Anyone?
Cats are no match for New York City's rats (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38333054 - Nov 2023 (77 comments)
How rats became an inescapable part of city living - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413214 - Mar 2019 (52 comments)
The Case for Leaving City Rats Alone (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19207172 - Feb 2019 (14 comments)
Drones Help Rid Galapagos Island of Invasive Rats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078518 - Feb 2019 (58 comments)
New Zealand’s War on Rats (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16891549 - April 2018 (34 comments)
New Zealand’s War on Rats Could Change the World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15730337 - Nov 2017 (3 comments)
clearly an article sponsored by Big Mouse
They aren't doing a good job of keeping them "down" if they're on planes.
A few years ago, a coyote mom with her 5 pups set up shop on my front lawn. She'd keep a weather eye on me, and me on her, and we got along fine. Over the summer, the number of pups dwindled. I saw a severed head of one a ways away, I think it was done by an eagle. I think only 2 survived the summer.
I sometimes see 6 eagles at a time circling overhead. One flew by so close I could have touched its wingtip. Wow!
A bobcat lives nearby. I see his tracks in the snow, and saw him a couple times.
I live well within the Seattle metropolitan area. Isn't it amazing?
Bald eagles indeed!
>One of the most celebrated claims about Yellowstone’s wolves is facing a major challenge. Scientists say the study behind the famous trophic cascade story relied on flawed methods that overstated the ecological impact of wolf recovery. Their reanalysis found no evidence for a dramatic, park-wide surge in willow growth. Instead, the effects appear smaller and vary from place to place.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260613215510.h...
I live rural (Ontario) and we hear but never see them. But if you go into town, they're a frequent occurrence. Grabbing people's pets and stuff.
If it was just foxes... fine. But coyotes can be a problem.
but i've seen stories/footage of people's dogs-on-leashes getting attacked and that's a bit scary
I would like to mention that, even though Alberta is rat free, we still have mice that can make your life misreble if they somehow enter your house/office.
Are you an economic calculation problem denier?
eliminate smallpox. Check.
eliminate measles. Own goal.
https://cr.usembassy.gov/sections-offices/aphis/screwworm-pr...
also Alberta, Canada mentioned
I may not live in Alberta, but luckily rats aren't really a thing in my neck of the woods. Travel an hour down the highway and it's a different story.
Also, as an aside, people often don't believe me when I say I've never seen a cockroach before in my life. Not a one. I've seen pictures of em, and I'm pretty sure if I saw one of those things irl I would absolutely shit myself.
https://www.gopherholemuseum.org/
My dad and uncles lived near the southern border as kids, would hunt rats by the train station/grain elevator with a .22 back in the 50's & 60's.
I always thought this was interesting (how many people are super scared of cockroaches). I'm absolutely terrified of bugs, I see cockroaches very rarely, and while I wouldn't pet one... They're not too bad? There's tons of bugs that are way scarier. Spiders, house centipedes, camel crickets. And that's just the stuff that actually exists near me. If I encountered an average Australian insect, good God, I'd run screaming. But cockroaches? Eh
I assume it's because cockroaches are associated with filth, and they tend to occur in large numbers. But as individual bugs, on the surface level they're not too bad. (Not "disagreeing" or anything, just think the different perspectives are neat)
https://www.epa.gov/ipm/cockroaches-and-schools
Except for whatever reason, I am absolutely terrified of moths and butterflies. I don't want to be touched by either of those ever and I don't want them inside my house. I can appreciate butterflies are pretty and colourful and all that but I still don't want them to be near me.
That one is pretty shocking. When I lived in South Carolina I remember I used to walk this one road late at night. Once it was dark enough I could see them scattering underneath the streetlights on the fucking sidewalk. Reminded me of sidewalk lizards in Florida, but grosser. I live in the Midwest now. I’m just glad they’re smaller here and don’t fly.
But they maintain such a critically low number through aggressive, non-stop actions that we declare it "rat free", though that's a misnomer. Similar to the measles free status doesn't actually mean measles free, but rather that it isn't spreading uncontrolled.
Though as someone who lives in Ontario, I just wanted to add that I've never seen a vermin rat in my life in this province. Not in Toronto or its subways, not on its streets, nor in various other cities throughout the province. I've seen mice, of course, but never rats. I know they exist here, but someone having not experienced them doesn't mean much.
But wild rats are rare. Albertans have grown so unaccustomed to rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of the 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats.
Definitely not my experience. Lived at Spadina & Dundas.
Relevant government website for those curious
We have online reporting for rat sightings that they take action on