Word: rodent
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Interstellar Influence? In other countries the sudden disappearance of rodent swarms is less spectacular. Yet they always disappear. Zoologists still wonder why. In northern Canada "an outburst of mouse-meat" is always accompanied by an increase of foxes, hawks and other mouse-loving predators. But mouse cycles in Britain, where predators have been largely killed off, are as regular and violent as in wilder lands...
...rodents increase, so do rodent epidemics. Nevertheless, epidemics are too erratic to explain the periodic ebb & flow of rodent population. Field mice flourish in dry weather, suffer in wet weather. But mouse cycles recur regardless of weather cycles...
Awareness of rodent cycles also helps prevent diseases among human beings. In Norway, for example, lemming invasions are accompanied by outbreaks of "lemming fever"-a form of tularemia. Vole outbreaks in India stimulate the dread bubonic plague; in Central Europe, food poisoning ("ptomaine poisoning"); in Africa, a fever of men and sheep...
...Dumbo eventually has his day. Under the personal management of Timothy Q. Mouse, a rough rodent of the Jimmy Durante school and a vigorous new Disney character, Dumbo discovers what his ears are good for-flying. This time he takes off from his window high in the burning building like an angry dive-bomber, turning, banking, looping the loop, and finally machine-gunning the other performers with peanuts sucked into his trunk from the vendor's cart...
...angry rodent sealed his vertebrae, the frightened laundryman stripped off his coat and was starting on his shirt when the squirrel shot out of his slcove. When he had recovered his composure, the Radcliffe prospects were far in the distance...