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Of Rats and People
It happens like clockwork every forty-eight years. Scientists are thus far unable to explain why approximately twice each century, bamboo trees flower in certain regions of Asia, namely India and Bangladesh.
When the bamboo tree flowers, the blossoms develop into highly nutritious fruits with seeds very high in protein. This all sounds as if it would be a very pleasant phenomenon – and indeed it would all be very pleasant – except for one thing. There are rats who live in these regions who consider the bamboo blossoms to be their favorite food.
These rats thrive on the tasty, nutritious flowers. Within months of the first blooms, the rat population has swelled and multiplied many times over. Instead of the usual one in twelve baby rats surviving a typical litter, with the benefit of the highly nutritious bamboo blossoms, now all twelve rats survive. Within months, each of these baby rats grows into adulthood and, together with a mate, is now capable of producing another dozen rats every several months. Within a year after the first bamboo blooms appear, the rat population has grown to staggering proportions with rats outnumbering the local people by hundreds or thousands to one.
By the time the rat population has grown into the many millions, the bamboo trees stop flowering. The rats then turn their hungry appetites to other food sources. They begin ravaging farmers’ fields. They are known to devour and destroy an entire season’s crop overnight.
Once the crops in the fields have been decimated, the rats move into the people’s homes. They start eating whatever they can find in the cupboards. Once they have eaten every scrap of food in the house, they turn their starving appetites on small children, and eventually, adults. The people are forced to then hunt the rats and eat them, since the rats have eaten or destroyed all of their food supplies.
Since these infestations occur quite predictably once every forty-eight years, chances are, if you live in one of these areas with bamboo trees you will experience at least one infestation during your lifetime.
Older people in the villages, depending on when they were born in the cycle, may have survived either one or two infestations in their lifetimes. The last infestation before the present one occurred in 1959-1961. The one before that was in 1912-1914.
Survivors of the infestation that occurred around 1960 described the rats then as being “as big as pigs”. The rat plague was so bad then that the people of Mizo, India launched a rebellion that lasted for twenty years.
This is why the words “bamboo trees blooming” will forever strike terror in the hearts of the people of the rat lands. Their minds are forever haunted by thoughts of being overrun by rats.
Happy Halloween!
