Word: ratting
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...skilled as their choice of quotations. Recollected events and human voices carry the reader from the first shots (and words) at Lexington in 1775 to a chorus-like finale at Yorktown. Flashes of humor and high spirits lighten the hardships along the way. Washington (on inflation): "A rat in the shape of a horse is not to be found at this time for less than ?200." A very young officer to his wife, after the battle of Princeton: "Oh, my Susan! It was a glorious day and I would not have been absent from it for all the money...
...given the abstruse and archaic state of medicine in France before the Revolution, Itard achieved a minor miracle in teaching Victor at all. The foremost doctors of the day were quick to declare Victor a congenital idiot and asked to banks him to the inhuman, rat-infested cubicles which served as the asylums of Paris. "He's not deaf and dumb because he was left in the forest, he was left in the forest because he was deaf and dumb," they said, and one rumor had Victor the illegitimate son of a provincial notaire who cast him into the woods...
...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...
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...