‘Luddite attitude’ won’t frighten off the rats

IN response to Micheal Job’s letter on non-poisonous ways of dealing with rats and mice (May 24), I was reminded of the famous scene in Fawlty Towers where Manuel has a “Siberian hamster” for a pet and Basil is trying to tell him it is a rat: “Ever hear of the Black Death, Manuel?

It is when a load of Siberian hamsters got on ships and came to Europe.”

It springs to mind here. If Mr Job would care to check out how harmless rats and mice are he might find the diseases transmittable to humans from rats include: rat bite fever, murine typhus, salmonellosis (bacterial food poisoning), leptospirosis (Weils Disease), trichinosis, rickettsial disease, melioidosid, pasteurellosis and brucellosis, typhus, bubonic plague and hantavirus.

I would rather live with a decomposing rat under my floor boards for a week or two than with the black plague. After all, I can use a modern thing called an air freshener to mask the smell, buy a bunch of flowers, as they used to do in the olden days to mask the smell of putrfecation, or simply open a window.

I don’t know what shop Mr Job buys his food supplies in, but I generally find my rat poision in the hardware section and my bread and vegetables in the food department of the store.

Not to mind the amount of modern-day rat bait you would have to consume to kill yourself is very large.

And the old-style lethal poisons are long gone from the marketplace.

This kind of Luddite thinking has no place in modern society, especially when it comes to dealing with vermin.

Seán McGovern

Parteen

Co Clare