All plans for the destruction of rats are welcomed by the keeper, because rats are the most numerous of all egg-thieves. He heartily joins the foxes, stoats, and weasels in their war on rats, though he is for ever at war with his co-operators. He believes that there are now more rats than ever, and has figures at his finger-tips to prove the growth of the rat-plague. If, he argues, there were only one rat to every acre in England and Wales, and if each rat did damage only to the extent of one farthing a day, the loss in a year would be £15,000,000. And he quotes a report which says that a single poultry-fancier in Dorsetshire lost £80 in a year through rats; that the owner of a flour-mill lost £150 in a year, through the gnawing of sacks alone; that men have attributed their bankruptcy chiefly to rats; and that the damage done by rats in this country is greater than the damage done by the cobra and tiger in India. The gamekeeper holds that there ought to be complete, organised co-operation against rats over wide areas, and heavily blames the farmers for not giving proper assistance to keepers in their rat-war. By delaying over-long the threshing of their corn-stacks farmers certainly give rats a grand chance to increase and multiply; and when ricks are left unthreshed until April the rats leave them without let or hindrance, to spread over the countryside as the weather grows warmer, and food is to be found everywhere. The keeper argues that ricks should be threshed betimes, to allow the rats to be properly dealt with. A day or two beforehand he would have the rats which lie in out-lying burrows, in neighbouring hedges, driven into the rick; this can be effected by tainting the burrows with paraffin--a simple plan is to blow in smoke from paraffin-steeped rags with a bee-smoker. Then the keeper would have the rick surrounded by half-inch wire-netting. At the time of the threshing he would like to be summoned to the scene, and he would see to it that there were six or seven smart ratting-dogs present, and that they were constantly supplied with drinking-water. In one case where this plan was tried, six hundred rats were accounted for from one rick. Even after threshing and rat-killing on these lines, rats will be found, if sought, in hidden holes where the rick stood--packed to suffocation to the number perhaps of seventy or eighty. * * * * * Ratting without Ferrets