Word: verminous
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...fleas scattered over Hunan by Japanese warplanes were perhaps the world's most pampered vermin, raised by the imperial army's Epidemic Prevention and Water-Supply Unit, better known as Unit 731. Today the ruins of its headquarters, located outside the Manchurian city of Harbin, stand next to a village schoolyard. Chatter from the nearby basketball court wafts past an unpainted wooden shed with a shabby metal roof that covers 96 cement pits, each a meter square. Here, 60 years ago, Japanese doctors infected yellow rats with the plague and dropped them into flea-filled oil drums. Workers then loaded...
...Afghanistan and Back," also makes for a fascinating look at the life of the foreign press. Sleeping on vermin-infested mats in freezing bungalows, Rall describes how they all became walking ATMs, dolling out $120 a day for translators and $800 for ten-minute car rides. But who's exploiting who in such an impoverished country? When a Northern Alliance leader tells the journalists at the front, "If you stay after dark some of my troops will rob you. And maybe worse," it becomes a "commuter war," complete with parking attendants. Even under constant threat of bombs, robbery and murder...
...Pigeons don't rank very high in the avian pecking order. In most places they are thought of only as statue-soiling, vermin-carrying rats with wings. But India's eastern state of Orissa holds the urban nuisances in greater esteem. Since the end of World War II, the Orissa police department has employed some 600 trained pigeons as official messengers. Capable of ferrying vital letters at up to 80 km/h to remote police outposts, the stalwart birds proved more reliable than the region's hopelessly erratic telephone network, especially during cyclone season when high winds frequently downed lines...
Cruelty is the reason the anti-hunt Britons give for why they want the sport stopped. Yet, I wonder. Some are sincere animal lovers, but the whiff of hypocrisy is strong. For a start, no one talks of stopping the killing of foxes. Considered vermin, tens of thousands are destined to be slaughtered every year in a variety of ugly ways. Snaring is one of them, a practice banned in some European countries - but not in Britain. Snares are supposed to be checked within a limit of 12 hours, by which time foxes, half crazed with fear, have been known...
...matter what shortcomings gas bombing has, it does have a few unintended benefits. Toxic as chlorine dioxide is to anthrax, it's also murder on mice, roaches and all manner of other vermin that may elude conventional extermination. But as the gas dissipates, it leaves behind a fine, white powder that looks rather like the contents of the original letter sent to Daschle--the last thing skittish Senate staff members and postal employees want to find on their desks and machinery when they return to work...