Latest news with #Rattus
Powys County Times
28-07-2025
- Business
- Powys County Times
Letter: We must all hope new scheme works for farmers
Rattus was not impressed by the 2024 version of the Sustainable Farming Scheme SFS which will shortly replace the BPS payments in Wales which have kept most farms in profit for years. The latest version has dropped the 10% tree cover which was always going to be a major ask for many farmers but also a major contributor to acrimonious disputes. It also restored SSSI's to be included which was one of the ludicrous parts of the previous iteration. OK it is not perfect but correctly is focused on public money for public goods. Why should Welsh Government subsidize farmers to produce lamb for Europeans to eat? There are aspects of SFS that Rattus and farmers will struggle to understand such as the need for on farm soil testing UA1. There are aspects such as the Veterinary requirement UA12 that will make life difficult for landowners that let their land. The aspiration to restore hedgerows should be applauded but the details of payment rates will severely affect take up. What is missing is advice and guidance from the properly informed, who know your farm and your business and can point you in the right direction. That is not going to be easy but the reference to collaborative action via the Integrated Natural Resources Scheme might be the way forward. Welsh Government and RPW are reluctant to engage, hopeless at communication and fed up with being sworn at. They are not the best partners to restore biodiversity in Wales. If they tried to behave like real people you could talk to not AI automatons this might actually work. There is no point in demanding a different scheme. After seven-plus years it is what it is.
Powys County Times
30-06-2025
- Health
- Powys County Times
NHS: Idiot dentist policies have real world consequences
Rattus has heard that National Health dentists in Wales are giving up and going private in droves. In Wales, you no longer choose your National Health dentist, there is one chosen for you. This means that a good dentist who has given sterling service to a practice over 40 years loses the patients they know and love. It also means that any patient seeing a new dentist has to provide lots of information that their usual dentist already has and that the dental surgeon has to make a thorough examination rather than just do what is necessary. This is a complete waste of time. I think Welsh Government are trying to kill off National Health Dentistry completely so everyone has to go private. This actually puts an extra burden on our health service as a significant number of patients are admitted to hospital with acute dental problems and probably sepsis and a generation of children suffer from bad teeth. Rattus is delighted that it doesn't apply to patients who see National Health dentists in England - yet? Can we at the Senedd election next year choose people who can understand that idiot policies have consequences or shall we just have a vote on getting rid of the Senedd.
Bloomberg
31-01-2025
- Science
- Bloomberg
Climate Change Is Helping Fuel an Urban Rat Boom
From Ratatouille 's Remy to New York's infamous pizza rat, there may be no animal more locked into a love-hate relationship with humans than the genus Rattus. Found on every continent but Antarctica, rats are often seen — with good reason — as a proxy for poverty, filth and disease. And a study published this week in the journal Science Advances suggests that as the climate warms, rat populations are increasing, too. Milder winters across the Northern Hemisphere are helping rats thrive in ever denser metropolitan areas. Just a handful of warmer weeks a year in a bustling city is enough to boost rodent population growth over time, according to the study. 'That's potentially two to four extra weeks a year that they can be above ground, foraging for food, acquiring those resources that they need to actually reproduce,' said Jonathan Richardson, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Richmond and lead author of the study. A ballooning rodent population has the potential to create added headaches for public officials already fighting infestations. Rats can damage urban infrastructure and act as a vector for disease. They also take 'a measurable toll' on the mental health of people coexisting with them, according to the study. And there's an economic cost — cities across the globe are already spending $500 million each year to try and keep the rats at bay. In New York, for example, Mayor Eric Adams has declared a ' war on rats,' appointed a rat czar tasked with rodent mitigation efforts and hosted the city's first-ever National Urban Rat Summit. Urban centers that saw larger increases in temperature over the study periods had larger increases in rat populations, the authors found. Of the 16 cities analyzed, 11 exhibited a growing rat population, including Washington, DC, San Francisco and New York. Population density was another contributing factor to the increase in rodents with denser cities seeing greater growth.
