75 years of Alberta’s mission to keep rats at bay [Video]

Twice a year, a patrol team scrutinizes barns, straw bales and grain storage bins along a 600-kilometre stretch of the Alberta-Saskatchewan boundary. They’re looking for rats, continuing a 75-year mission to stop the rodents from making themselves at home in the province.

“My grandfather,” says Lincoln Poulin, the president of Poulin’s Pest Control, “was known as the man that killed 10 million rats.”

Napoleon Poulin invented a rodenticide called Poulin’s Rat Doom and was a key figure in the early days of Alberta’s rat control program, established in 1950 after Norway rats were discovered on an Alberta farm.

The rodents, thought to originate in China, first arrived on the east coast of North America in 1775 and gradually spread west, travelling about 24 kilometres per year and arriving in Saskatchewan in the 1920s.

By 1959, the number of infestations in Alberta increased to 573. But after 1959, they plummeted, reaching …