Recently, by means it would be otiose to rehearse, I came into the possession of the enchanted flute belonging to the Pied Piper of Hamelin. After a bit of voudonic reverse engineering I have figured out how to construct a larger and automated version that will allow me to banish every single undomesticated Norway rat from a given municipality. (This will include the sewers, in case you’re wondering.) The Super!Flute, once used, will fill the rats’ tiny little brains with such fear that they will swarm out out of the city as hastily as possible; a city the size of my home town, Memphis, will be emptied of rats in a night, and the rats will be unable to return for a hundred human generations.
Oh you know, the usual reasons. What do rats eat there? Moles? Insects? Those’ll overtake the town and you’ll have to bring in foreign frogs or something. Those’ll go nuts and you’ll need to bring in raccoons. Then come the raccoon-eating bears. It’ll be a whole thing.
The roaches won’t be eaten by the rats in your walls. You won’t have a food reserve for when times are bad. You won’t be able to spread plague when your house is under siege. You’ll lose a good way to prevent guests from staying. I still say kill them.
I dunno; we don’t have any rats here (barring politicians, har har), and I don’t feel any lack. Of course, they don’t have an niche in our local ecology. I say, give it a try! If you need rats, it probably won’t be too hard to get some more.
To add a little more detail, the province of Alberta, where both featherlou and I live, has been rat free for a number of years now. From “The History of Rat Control in Alberta,” published by the provincial government:
The full text of the item outlining the history of the program and its impact is here.
I can see 2 problems with this. The first is that when you run the rats out of town they have to go somewhere else and that somewhere else will be into neighboring towns or farmland. Corn and wheat crops will be decimated and people will evacuate the neighboring town in droves which means they will not be spending money or supporting the economy in your town.
The second is that this pipe has also shown the ability to effect children. What happens if you accidentally set it incorrectly and the children all flee the city? And since this works for 100 human generations as women get pregnant and their fetuses reach a level where they cross from zygote to teeny human they will actively attempt to flee their mother’s body, causing mass miscarriages for the next several thousand years. On the plus side though this would finally settle the debate on when a fetus can be declared a person.
I was thinking West Memphis, Arkansas, Oak. It’s not like God doesn’t hate them anyway.
One the one hand the city fathers have surely heard of the previous Piper. On the other hand they’re idiots. On the third hand I was planning this altruistic purposes, so there’d be no change anyway.
Which is why I’ll be sending them to WEST Memphis. Across the river. There’s nothing useful there.
Or maybe just send the lot of the rodents to drown themselves in the Mississippi River.
Hey, this isn’t my first rodeo. I made quadruple-sure to remove all the “primate” subroutines from the enchantment, thankyouverymuch.
