le burrow.

Now as to keeping Rats in store cages at home. Look well after them, and
I think it is possible to keep them alive for quite a year; but if you
keep, say, 20 in one store cage and neglect their feeding,, you will find
that when hungry in the night they will kill the weakest of their number
and eat it, sometimes even eating two or three in one night, leaving the
skin as clean as if a man had skinned them. It is always the best plan
to put the Rats in different cages, according to their sizes. The young
ones together, the old ones together, and the middle-aged ones together,
as they keep themselves much cleaner when thus divided, and do not fight
so much as they would otherwise. They must also be kept in a warm place;
if not, they soon have cramp. Also keep them in a dark place and see
that they have plenty of water; sprinkle them now and then with it so
that they will wash themselves. It is astonishing what a hungry Rat will
do. I have seen them in the summer at dusk run at an old hen with her
chickens under her, and almost as quick as I tell it, the Rat has
snatched a live chicken and run with it under a pigsty floor.

I have known them to take half-grown young ducks from the water side. I
remember once ferreting round a pit, near a barn, and when I put my
ferret in the hole, it pulled out two dead chickens and three
middle-sized dead ducks, and behind them, not more than a yard deep in
the pit bank, was an old Rat. I have also known them to get into the
coops where a gamekeeper was rearing his pheasants, and to kill nine
young ones in a single night all from under the same hen.

Rats are also fond of eggs. I have read of many ways in which Rats take
eggs, but in my quarter-of-a-century's experience of Ratting I never saw
Rats take eggs save in one way, and that is, dragging or rolling them
along the floor with their front paws, until they get them to the mouth
of the hole. I remember one place where I was ferreting. There was an
old cellar, the door of which at the top of the steps had to my knowledge
been nailed up two or three years. Out of the hen house the Rats had
eaten a hole at each side of the cellar door at the bottom. One day we
burst open the door, went into the cellar (where it was impossible for a
hen to get whilst the door was closed) and beneath the bottom step we
caught two Rats. On lifting the flag at the bottom of the steps, we
found 15 whole eggs, some good and some bad, a