Before going to sleep, you ought to make sure no food is left forgotten somewhere on the floor or table. Otherwise, you may end up with some familiar and unwelcome guests: rats. Just a furry rodent is enough to cause revulsion and complain to authorities – for example: Ministry of Agriculture of Bangladesh. The ministry has revved up the efforts to control agricultural pest particularly 'rat' across the country by selecting 600 rat hunters.
Bangladesh's rats are nasty, and there are about millions of the furry, disease carrying creatures roaming around the paddy and vegetable fields across the country. Every year approximately 4 crore tonnes of rice, wheat, corn and 30.06 lakh tonnes of vegetables are destroyed by rats worth Tk 800 crore. If a farmer complains about his losses incurred due to the rats, Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) advised him on how to find a pesticide to cull the pest including rodents.
The government has been trying to shoot the trouble by appointing pest controllers since 2010. This year it has identified 615 rat hunters to ratchet up its efforts to prevent rodents from devouring the country's staple food and destroying other agricultural outputs while experts favour the conservation of rat predators in nature for the purpose.
The hunt for rat hunters throughout the country was notified by the DAE on September 17, as part of its ongoing programme to rout the rats causing annual losses of rice worth over Tk 700 crore.
Director General of DAE Md Abdul Muyeed said that already an expert pool has been formed as the DAE had been encouraging the mouse culling programme for many years. The current initiative of selecting over 600 hunters throughout the country is the first of its kind, he said. The DAE would capitalize on the trapping skills of the hunters and transfer their techniques to others, he added.
Lauding the DAE programme, Professor of Dhaka University's Zoology Department Mohammad Firoj Jaman said that conserving predators like snake, monitor lizard, hawk, owl, jackal and mongoose would be more sustainable for preventing the growing rat population. He said that the rat population was rising because of the breakdown in the 'predator and prey relationship'. The number of predators preying on the rats in the country reduced significantly due to loss of their habitats amid urbanization of rural areas, he said.
Som Tudu, a 45-year old farmer at village Brammanvita under Birganj upazila of Dinajpur District said that he was not aware about his inclusion as a mouse hunter in the DAE list. Claiming himself as a natural rat hunter, Tudu said he had been trapping rats for long for protecting his paddy field. The mice menace with the advent of Aman rice harvest had increased so much that he trapped 50 mice on average in every night in last one week. The rats trapped weighed from 300 grams to 500 grams, he said.
The Plant Protection Wing of the DAE in its publication on rat prevention said 18 types of rats were identified in the country which can be culled by applying a number of traps. Apart from chronic poisoning of rats to death, preservation of wild cat, mongoose, jackal and owl has been suggested by the wing for curbing rat menace. The agricultural sector is bearing the brunt as four per cent of the country's annual agricultural output had been eaten up by rats, said the DAE officials. In 2017, the country produced 3.7 crore tonnes of rice, wheat and corn, and 30.06 lakh tonnes of vegetables, but rats alone destroyed 15 lakh tonnes. On June 22, 2015, the then Agriculture Minister Matia Chowdhury told in Parliament that rats damaged food grains, including paddy, rice and wheat worth around Tk 723.72 crore in the 2014-15 Fiscal Year. Firoj Jaman said that rats have a life span of maximum five years and usually breed three times a year while giving birth to 16-20 offspring every time.Head of the Department of Agronomy of Bangladesh Agricultural University Dr Md Abdus Salam said that controlling rat with traps and poison is not an easy task. Natural ways of controlling rat population are preferable to hunting, he said lamenting the fact that bushes and hedges — natural abode for predators — are being destroyed.  Syama Pradad Saha, another selected mouse hunters by the DAE, said that he kept 10 cats in his rice mill to contain the mouse. The 65-year old from Shologhar in Munshiganj district said that he adopted other methods like setting traps but still preferred the natural ways for controlling the rat population. He said his selection as a mouse hunter carried no special meaning to him as he had been killing rats for protecting croplands and mills for a long time. He was awarded a crest and a certificate in 2017-18 for rat hunting on his own accord.
In 2015, a Bangladeshi farmer was named national hero for killing 160,000 rats. Bangladesh crowned a new national rat killer champion after his team eradicated more than 160,000 rodents in 12 months.
Farmer Abdul Khaleq Mirbohor won Tk 20,000 Bangladeshi ($250) at a ceremony in Dhaka for eliminating 161,220 rats in a year as part of nationwide campaign to stop grain being gorged by rodents. Mirbohor hired mostly women volunteers to kill the rats in paddy and wheat fields then submitted the tails of the deceased animals to the regional agriculture office for counting.
"Mr Mirbohor is a passionate rat killer. During the ceremony, he told the dignitaries that nothing gives him pleasure (more) than killing grain-eating rodents,"
"I've been killing rats since 1996. I love culling them. They are enemy of our country and people. They devour grains, ground nuts and spread diseases," said the 55-year-old farmer.
Government official Borhan Uddin said that the farmer was "obsessed" with killing rats. "Fellow villagers called him mad because of his obsession. He is like a Pied Piper of Hamelin," he said.