Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 74, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 December 1916 — DON’T MEDDLE WITH NATURE [ARTICLE]

DON’T MEDDLE WITH NATURE

You May Start Something That Will Cause Trouble. Forty years ago the planters of Trinidad were in despair. Rats were ravaging the great sugar cane plantations. Traps, cats and ferrets had all proved useless. Ruin stared the planters in the face. Then some genius suggested the importation of the mongoose. The mongoose is a native of India, a charming, furry beast that looks like a big and amiable ferret. It makes a delightful pet, but its reputation rests mainly on the fact that it is the deadly enemy of the poisonous cobra and also the finest ratter in the world. A score of these animals were sent for. Soon there were no more rats. Then the mongoose turned its att/ntion to the chicken yard. Shortly poultry was almost extinct and eggs at a premium. Next the mongoose cleaned out the native bin’s and a plague of caterpillars ensued. How are the mighty fallen!

Today there is a premium of 3 shillings on the head of each mongoose, yet the pest is said to be getting worse. Now the islanders talk of introducing the Indian starling, in the hope of keeping down the grasshoppers, which are ravaging the crops, or else of utilizing the Barbadoes blackbird for a similar purpose. The muskrat, which is an animal many times the size of any British rat, has been trapped for generations in British North America for the sake of its fur. Spine twenty years ago a Hungarian landowner, Imported several pairs of muskrats and turned them loose in a lake on his property. They multiplied in surprising fashion, for they had none of the enemies which, in the native country, keep them under control, and for a time the Importer reaped quite a considerable income by the sale of the skins.

But the animals soon began to spread, and then came stories of burst dams and broken canal banks. The creatures burrowed everywhere, and ifeach year the tale of damage increased. Just before the great war broke out the Hungarian government offered a prize equal to $25,000 to any person who could invent some method of exterminating them. St. Helena, famous as the island prison of Napoleon, was at one time covered with a thick forest. Cattle did not do well there, and goats were imported to give meat and milk for the settlers. They soon ran wild and betook themselves to the hills, where they multiplied by thousands and browsed on the young .trees and shrubs. Today the island is little better than a desert.

Sable island is a great crescent of sand in the Atlantic off Nova Scotia, and for centuries had no inhabitants but gulls and rabbits. Rats were accidentally imported in goods consigned to the lighthouse, and they became such a pest that in 1 880 cats were brought in to cope with them. That finished the rats. And then the cats turned on the rabbits and wiped them out. The cats became so savage that they were actually a danger, and some bright settler imported a pair of big northern foxes to cope with the cats. The foxes killed the cats, and then, having nothing left to eat, they died out. Today Sable island has only the gulls left.