rey, but its idea is different from
all these.

VII

THE BARN OWL

A FRIEND OF MAN

A thunderstorm has burst on the common rat. Its complicity in the spread
of the plague, which has been proved up to the hilt, has filled the cup
of its iniquities to overflowing, and we have awakened to the fact that
it is and always has been an arch-enemy of mankind. Simultaneously, in
widely separated parts of the world, a "pogrom" has been proclaimed, and
the accounts of the massacre which come to us from great cities like
Calcutta and Bombay are appalling and almost incredible. They would move
to pity the most callous heart, if pity could be associated with the
rat. But it cannot.

The wild rat deserves that humane consideration to which all our natural
fellow-creatures on this earth are entitled; but the domestic rat (I use
this term advisedly, for though man has not domesticated it, it has
thoroughly domesticated itself) cannot justify its existence. It is a
fungus of civilisation. If it confined itself to its natural food, the
farmer's grain, the tax which it levies on the country would still be
such as no free people ought to endure. But it confines itself to
nothing. As Waterton says: "After dining on carrion in the filthiest
sink, it will often manage to sup on the choicest dainties of the
larder, where like Celoeno of old _vestigia foeda relinquit_." It kills
chickens, plunders the nests of little birds, devouring mother, eggs and
young, murders and feeds on its brothers and sisters and even its own
offspring, and not infrequently tastes even man when it finds him
asleep. The bite of a rat is sometimes very poisonous, and I have had to
give three months' sick leave to a clerk who had been bitten by one. Add
to this that the rat multiplies at a rate which is simply criminal,
rearing a family of perhaps a dozen every two or three months, and no
further argument is needed to justify the war which has been declared
against it. Every engine of war will, no doubt, be brought into use,
traps of many kinds, poisons, cats, the professional rat-catcher, and a
rat bacillus which, if once it gets a footing, is expected to originate
a fearful epidemic.

But I need not linger any more among rats, which are not my subject. I
am writing in the hope that this may be an opportune time to put in a
plea for a much persecuted native of this and many other countries,
whose principal function in the economy of nature is to kill rats