Blackburn town centre management have been inundated with complaints about rats being seen feeding on discarded takeaway food.
This is particularly the case around Darwen Street. Having a high number of takeaways and the River Blakewater flowing through the thoroughfare doesn’t help matters. This river, which gave Blackburn its name, has always been a haven for rats and they can often be seen scuttling around its banks.
One solution to this problem could be an introduction of stoats and weasels to the town centre. Both are woodland creatures, but are also known to inhabit urban areas too, just like foxes and badgers.
Stoats are voracious killers and known to attack and kill rats. They are curious animals and will investigate squeaking noises, especially if they sound like a rat or rabbit in distress. It is supposed to be possible to attract them by standing still and sucking hard on the back of your hand.
Stoats are much bigger than weasels. In fact a weasel can put its head through a wedding ring, whereas a stoat cannot. Stoats also have a bushy black tip to their tail and in certain parts of the country, their fur turns white in winter, apart from this black bit at their tail end. In this state, stoats are known as ermine. So they are stoatally different and weaselly identified.
Unfortunately for stoats, this ermine fur is used by British and European royalty and aristocracy in their robes, so they are highly prized in the fur industry. In Ireland they are protected. Unsurprisingly, in Britain they are not.
Another predator which would make mincemeat of Blackburn’s rat population is the Eurasian Lynx. There have been calls by the Lynx UK Trust for re-introducing this pointy-eared feline back to Britain. They feed on rats and are also natural predators of deer, whose spiralling population through lack of predators, is starting to become a problem. Lynx used to be native to Britain – like wolves and bears. Sadly for the Lynx, the last one was hunted to extinction over a thousand years ago. So we owe them one.
The old saying ‘One man’s loss is another man’s gain’, could apply to Blackburn and the Orkney Islands. It seems these islands, at the northern tip of Scotland, want to eradicate their entire stoat population to protect native birdlife. There may be a handy solution here – why not send them down Blackburn where they can solve our rat problem, maybe take out the odd pigeon too. This could be a case of killing two birds with one stoat.