Very much enjoyed this piece in the latest @WorksInProgMag about how Alberta became a rat-free sanctuary and the only significant human-inhabited place on earth that is free of them. Excellent "you can just do things" energy. "William Lobay, a crop protection supervisor at the Alberta Department of Agriculture, came up with the idea of a buffer zone focused on the area of prairie and parkland that was most vulnerable to penetration. In late 1950, Albertan officials approved his Rat Control Zone, a roughly 600-by-29-kilometer strip along the part of its eastern border with Saskatchewan. In the zone, William Lobay and his colleagues surveyed cargo and vehicles that entered the province, and inspected vulnerable sites like farms, grain elevators, feed stacks, barns, sheds, and abandoned buildings, where food and shelter made rat establishment most likely."