i wonder if Alberta is suffering, in some way, ecologically from the lack of rodents
@fatehbaz, any thoughts?
Alberta’s rat control program is bad as hell, program doesn’t even work because there are definitely non-native Norway rats in Alberta, and it mostly results in the mass killing of native rodents and the further destruction of “North America’s most endangered biome” (native prairie) by encouraging the elimination of the prairies’ keystone rodent species.
without doxxing myself, we’ll say that i’ve had many firsthand interactions with Alberta rodents. including the Rattus rats that allegedly don’t exist. anecdotally, i’d say that the anti-rat pride in the province gives further excuses/encouragement to people to kill other native rodents perceived as either nuisance or inconsequential, like ground squirrels and native mice.
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the provincial rat control program targets only two individual non-native species, the Norway rat and roof rat (and, well, technically, any other non-native rat specifically of the genus Rattus that might hypothetically be somehow introduced). and the province isn’t even free of Norway/roof rats. Norway rats definitely exist in Alberta, but provincial authorities claim simply that Norway rat populations “don’t thrive” at scales like they do elsewhere in Canada.
Alberta is of course the economic/population center of the so-called “Prairie Provinces” and all of the plains-/prairie-based agriculture the moniker suggests. Calgary is a big whirlpool that sucks in money/wealth extracted from the prairies, so there is incentive to kill rodents.
the program asks landowners/farmers to self-report suspected Norway rats to authorities, so you can imagine how often native rodents get mistaken and reported. people wouldn’t mistake porcupines or beavers or ground squirrels for rats. but the provincial reporting site online still has to walk people through the process of differentiating Rattus rats from native muskrats.
the creatures that get persecuted as a result include the most obvious lookalikes, which are so-called “New World mice/rats” of the family Cricetidae, including native species like bushy-tailed woodrat, deer mouse, northern grasshopper mouse, western harvest mouse, long-tailed vole, meadow vole, sagebrush vole, and a few others. for some species, anti-rodent sentiment might be more significantly threatening, like how Alberta lies and the far extreme distribution range limit of the white-footed mouse and northern grasshopper mouse. the North American water vole, a resident of Alberta’s Rockies along the continental divide, already has very particular habitat requirements and a very limited distribution range (only lives in the Cascades and Northern/Central Rockies). Alberta is also home to western jumping mice, olive-backed pocket mice, and like a dozen “squirrels” in the Sciuridae family, like chipmunks, marmots, ground squirrels, flying squirrels, and prairie dogs.
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native prairie gets referred to as “the most endangered biome in North America” because so much of it is stolen and destroyed by monoculture planting, cattle ranching, and other industrial-scale agricultural extraction.
you routinely see Alberta referred to as “the Texas of Canada”. you know: fossil fuel extraction, plains farming, cattle ranching.
i’d say that, similar to agricultural and/or rural Great Plains culture in the US, there is already essentially unmitigated slaughter of “whistle-pigs”, which are Columbian ground squirrels and Richardson’s ground squirrels, which are often the target of so-called “gopher shooting/hunting” (a misnomer, since they’re not gophers; i mostly see these two species referred to as “prairie dogs”, which is also a misnomer). the extensive prairie tunnel/burrow systems made by whistle-pigs are essential, critical homes for bullsnakes, racers, prairie rattlesnakes, plains hognose snakes, plains spadefoot toads, Great Plains toads, and blotched tiger salamanders, all of which live precariously/sensitively in Alberta since this is, for them all, at the edge/limit of their distribution range.
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bison weren’t the only native prairie species targeted for elimination by agricultural industries and the settler-colonial land management agencies that did/do their bidding.
notoriously, Alberta was the site of the targeted killing of the swift fox and the black-footed ferret. swift fox still exist in some small isolated pockets of the northern Great Plains.
there were also, likely, unique subspecies/variations of the gray wolf which were endemic to and/or associated with the short-grass prairies and northern Great Plains, which may or may not be entirely extinct. meanwhile, black-footed ferrets were famously declared extinct in 1979 before a single surviving population from Wyoming was used to reintroduce the ferret to just several tiny little still-endangered populations in Montana/Wyoming/the Dakotas.
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anyway, there are definitely non-native Rattus rats in Alberta despite the publicity campaigns of Alberta’s cattle barons and landowners.
