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India’s Famine Rats and Superstition

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Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Nov 13, 1879

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 5, No. 43.

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India’s Famine Rats and Superstition

A CURIOUS superstition is exhibited in Western and Southern India, where the lands desolated by the famine of 1877 are now being ravaged by millions of rats. These animals have overspread the country like locusts, they destroy the crops almost as thoroughly, and are even more difficult to keep down. So grave has become the aspect of affairs that a "Rat Committee" has been appointed to inquire into the best means of getting rid of the creatures. The natives in some places refuse to destroy the rats, as they believe that the souls of the people who died in the famine have come back in the bodies of rats to get the food they should have had in their previous existence.—Ex.