Rat Attack

Last night the PBS program Nova reported on cyclical plagues of rats in the Indian state of Mizoram, warning viewers that some of the scenes about to be shown were too graphic for the elderly, small children, and pets.

Every 48 years, it seems, a plague of rats descends on Mizoram state, a landlocked subtropical region politically part of India, but isolated from the rest of the country by its location east of Bangladesh. The rats devour the rice crop just before it is ready for harvest, leaving subsistence farmers to starve.

The last time this happened, in 1959, the distress was so dire is spawned a rebel uprising that continued for 20 years.

Well, there a were a few gross-outs. There were some shots of mother rats devouring their young, for example--evidently this is necessary because the rats themselves generally live in a state of semi-starvation, only catching a break once ever 48 years when the local bamboo goes wacko and produces a bumper crop of bamboo fruit, so much that the rats have more food than they know what to do with and reproduce at astronomical levels.

When the bamboo germinate and are no longer edible, the hordes of rats attack the rice. So there were lots of scary shots (it looked like they shot these in a studio) of rats running fast through the underbrush--representing, I guess, a particularly voracious version of rat scurrying.

The baby rats themselves were pretty disgusting, kind of pink slimy Raisinettes, and there was a great display by villagers at one point of a bag full of 300,000 stinking rat tails collected to cash in on the rat-tail bounty imposed by the government to combat the plague.

Really, the most sick-making moment was when the geeky Australian biologist Ken Alpin, the first man to connect the rat attack with the bamboo boom, was slicing over dead mother rats to count their embryos.

This guy was great--while he was out there in the fields rooting for the farmers in their battle against the rats, he also confided at one point to the camera that as a science geek, he couldn't wait to see the coming rat attack in all its horror--after all, happening once every 48 years as it does, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Of course, just like Ken, that's what I was there to see myself, and what the show was selling, an opportunity to see a full force rat attack on defenseless villagers. Alas, it was not to be. Moi, the farmer whose fields we were monitoring, had by sheer luck planted his rice just early enough to get most of it in before the rats hit.

They showed up, scratched their tiny heads, and then scurried off camera to ravish the fields down the road.

And so I, too, deprived of rat disaster, switched over to the State of the Union.