War on Rats

The dhaman is a yellow-tinted snake, ranging from 4 ft. to 10 ft. in length, that once had the run of the Indian countryside. To the dismay of the Indian Parliament, these are hard times for the dhaman, as well as for the more than 20 other varieties of Indian herpetofauna that prey on, among other things, the domestic brown rat, known as Rattus rattus. Thanks in part to commerce, which values the hide of a snake more than that of a rat, the rodents have been winning the battle against their deadliest enemy. Two weeks ago, India's legislators decided it was time to redress the balance. They choked off the nation's lucrative snake-hunting business, hoping to restore the old level of conflict between the rat and its most slithery foe.

Unfair Odds. Specifically, India has clamped a ban on the roughly $2 million annual export of snakeskins. That seemingly modest action was, in fact, a firm declaration of war against the nation's estimated 4.8 billion rat population, which outnumbers humans by a ratio of 8 to 1. Those are unfair odds. India's rats are believed to eat or destroy almost half the grain consumed in India--100 million tons; moreover, the rats are disease carriers, profligate breeders and just plain pests.

Never small. India's rat problem has become urgent in recent times. The reason is that India, with a bumper crop of 114 million tons of grain last year, wants to stockpile 15 million tons against possible bad times ahead. The size of the crop far outruns the country's storage capacity; much of the grain has been piled up in impromptu warehouses, like unused college buildings, where the rats are having a field day. Hence the need for more snakes. Curiously, both animals are considered sacred--and thus inviolable in some regions. Even though India has conducted antirat campaigns from at least 1881 onward, lingering reverence may be one reason why the pesky rodents continue to thrive.

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