Did the idea of rat bins originate in India or Hong Kong?

Submitted by jill on Wed, 03/29/2017 - 02:45

Two of the photos that David comments on Gwulo include rat bins  https://gwulo.com/atom/19435 and https://gwulo.com/atom/19412  Previous correspondence has focused on how late rat bins remained a feature of the Hong Kong landscape. Some current readers still remember them.

 My grandfather, Charles Warren, joined the PWD post-Plague in 1895 and spent the first five years of his career as Overseer and Inspector of Nuisances. I’m interested in finding out the nature of his responsibilities, which must have included rat control among them. From what I read in the government reports, although there was a rat bounty of 2 cents per head at the beginning of the century, actual rat bins were not introduced until 1908.

Does anyone know whether the idea of rat bins originated in Hong Kong, or whether they had already been introduced in India? (I see that the Indian Plague Commission’s report of 1908 is referred to) As far as I can tell, rat bins were first introduced in Hong Kong in 1908. I am copying below extracts from the Hong Kong Government reports of 1908 and 1909, which are the first to mention them.

1908 Report

Plague

There was a recrudescence of this disease during the year 1908, the total number of cases being 1,073, as compared with 240 in 1907 and 893 in 1906. It has frequently happened that cases of mild and severe Plague in the Colony have occurred alternately, so that the1908 epidemic may more justly be compared with the 1906 than the 1907 outbreak. (…)

The special staff of rat-catchers was abolished at the end of January, 1908, as it had been found that the cooperation of the Chinese could not thereby be obtained and it was not till near the end of the epidemic that a substitute scheme was adopted by which some 2,000 traps were distributed and several hundred special rat-bins put up throughout the City and Kowloon for the reception of rats caught by the people.

The rats are collected daily from these bins and sent for examination, and if any are infected the locality they come from is known, though not the individual house. This enables the Sanitary Department to watch for warnings of Plague in the different localities and if necessary to adopt special measures.

The reports of the Indian Plague Commission have been duly followed with the result that former measures of the disinfection of houses with disinfectants of the coal tar derivative series have given place to special washing of houses with a flea-killing mixture of water and an emulsion of kerosene oil with soap. Late in the year a large quantity of rat poison was obtained from India and it was decided to keep down the numbers of rats about houses by laying down a very large number of poison baits at one time and to continue to systematically lay down poison throughout the City and Kowloon.

1909 Report

Some 650 small bins have been fixed to telephone and lamp standards throughout the City and Kowloon and in the more important villages for the reception of dead rats. These bins are one-gallon drums with hinged covers and are filled two thirds full with a 5 per cent. solution of carbonated creosote, which is changed once a week. The native population is encouraged to put all rats which they may catch or find dead on their premises into these bins. These bins are visited once daily in the cool weather and twice daily in the hot weather by rat collectors (one for each of the ten health districts) and the rats duly ticketed and delivered to the mortuary for classification and bacteriological examination.

When a plague-infected rat is found in one of these bins, men are especially detailed to fill up all the rat runs in the houses adjoining such bin, rat poison is offered to all the neighbouring householders and special attention is paid to the integrity of all gratings for the exclusion of rats from the houses.

During the year 60,113 were caught or found dead in the city of Victoria and 16,022 in Kowloon; on bacteriological examination 399 of those found in the city and 108 of those from Kowloon were found to be infected with plague.

 

 

 

 

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Some info is provided here . I would imagine rat traps would have preceded the installation of rat bins. Some useful info here (double click) from 1902 with an Indian connection.

Thanks moddsey. I haven’t been able to find any reference to the use of rat bins in India so far, but haven’t had sight of more than pp. 1218-20 of the dauntingly large 1908 Indian Plague Commission’s report. Traps, poison, cats, disinfectant and cement all seem to have been thrown at the Hong Kong rat problem. I hadn’t heard about pre-infecting the rats with Danyz virus. Nobody seems to have taken credit for the inspired idea of anonymous disposal into rat bins, - much more successful with the Chinese population than the bounty system of 2 cents per rat, which might have meant connecting with a European official. I wonder if the idea was taken up elsewhere.

Just following-up. Neither have I been able to find any reference to the use of rat bins affixed to lamp posts in other countries. The general conclusions of the Indian Plague Commission can be found in the China Mail (Page 4) dated 14 September 1908. It is noted in the HK Weekly Press dated 20 February 1909, that rat bins and other measures employed to combat the rat menace were introduced 'during the last six months'. 

Thanks for pursuing this through the press and elsewhere. Thinking about the difficulties of introducing a project like this in such a vast country as India, it is clear that Hong Kong Island (and even Kowloon), being a contained and limited area, offered much greater chances of success, especially with the oversight of the Sanitary Board, the defined hierarchy of Sanitary Inspectors, allocated to specific districts and the availability of fast bacteriological analysis. The rapid uptake of the rat-bin project throughout the colony and the fact that it persisted so late into the century points to it being a success story. I expect that the minutes of a 1908 Sanitary Board meeting may provide the answer as to how the idea initiated.

Returning to Hong Kong in 1946 after the war, Dorothy Neale, reported rats in plague proportions because the Chinese in the Colony had eaten all the cats and dogs. She relates that the rats were indeed so bad that the Hong Kong Government offered a reward of ten cents for every hundred rats' tails that were brought in to the Health Office. As more and more rats' tails came in, it was finally discovered that the Chinese were killing rats in Canton and sending the tails down to Hong Kong for the money!

From Green Jade by Dorothy Neale, p. 85.