China trains fighting fox force to rout rodents

BEIJING, May 16 (Reuters) Animal husbandry officials in western China have deployed crack forces of trained wolves, eagles and foxes to combat an outbreak of marauding rats, local media reported today.

The Fuyun county government in Xinjiang's northern Altai region spent 80,000 yuan (10,400 dollars) buying and training 20 foxes at a special base to catch rats that threatened to destroy some 2 million hectares of grassland, the China Daily said.

''The rat populations in areas where the foxes make their homes are much smaller than in other areas. We plan to train and free 200 foxes into the wild every year,'' Shayila Wu, a local official, told the paper.

The local army contingent had also set up 50 perches for eagles, the paper said, adding that an eagle could eat about 10 rats a day on average.

The large plains rats, which were posing a threat to local people's livelihoods through environmental damage and disease, had bred heavily due to an unseasonably warm winter, the paper said.

Where rat poison had failed, the natural predators were ''expected to come in handy this year'', the paper said.

China has a history of using unorthodox means to eradicate pests. Mao Zedong launched the ''Four Pests'' campaign during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, instructing citizens to kill flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows.

Pest control efforts included banging pots and pans to scare sparrows into flight and have them eventually drop to earth dead from exhaustion.

REUTERS CS HS1037