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Chinese Rice Farmers Battle A Plague of Munching Mice
Tao Binfei, a farmer who faces the loss of a year's worth of labor, says of the mice, "You can easily step on them just by walking on the road, there are so many."
(Photos By Maureen Fan -- The Washington Post)
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Xu, the current party secretary, agreed: "It just couldn't work out without also using the stronger, homemade poison, because there were too many rats, everywhere."
He Huaxian, vice director of the Yueyang Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was touring Binhu on Saturday with the village doctor. During the rainy season, officials routinely distribute reading material reminding villagers not to touch the mice with their bare hands, not to allow children to touch the water, and to wear boots while standing in the soggy fields, he said.
But villagers said they applied the poison with their bare hands. They beat the mice with sticks, often disposing of the bodies using bare hands and shovels. Piles of dead rodents were burned, their bodies covered with lime to prevent the spread of disease. On Saturday, farmers stood in their rice paddies barefoot, replanting rice with uncovered hands.
One farmer who had no well said she had no choice but to draw drinking water from possibly contaminated village ponds.
It's a scene that repeats itself nearly every year. As soon as the water rises, farmers such as Tao Binfei can count on losing an entire year's worth of labor. Two of his three cats died last month after eating poisoned mice. "Later, I found rats in my house, eating the wood of my bed and window and also my wet vegetables," Tao said.
In addition to cats, two other natural predators are shrinking in number. Snakes, which can eat 400 rats a year, are increasingly caught by local residents and exported to Guangdong province, where they are a local delicacy, the China Daily newspaper reported. And the eating of owls, believed to cure headaches, has also helped enlarge the field mouse population, the paper said.
It's so bad that Hunan is trying to raise $800,000 to build a 24-mile wall to prevent future mice infestations; four miles of it would run though Binhu.
But the village's former party secretary doesn't consider that a permanent solution.
"Spreading poison and erecting a defensive wall can't deal with the root reason of the rat problem," said Tao Qunxian. "We need to conserve water so that the water in Dongting Lake stays level and that it doesn't dry out in the dry season. We've been attacked by rats since 1984."
Researcher Li Jie contributed to this report.
