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Dec 15, 2008, 20:05 GMT

Poison, not pied piper, beats Hamelin rats

Hamelin, Germany - Hamelin, the German city where a legendary Pied Piper once rid the town of both rodents and children, has beaten a modern-day rat infestation with poison, civic officials said Monday. Rat numbers surged this summer in an area of overgrown former garden allotments close to the city centre. In the medieval legend of the Pied Piper, a stranger playing music on a pipe mesmerized the rats to drown themselves in the river Weser in the year 1284. Because the city, known in the German language as Hameln, refused to pay the piper, he later vanished with all its children. The tale has become a beloved children's story round the globe and attracts tourists to Hamelin. This time round, municipal pest-control experts relied on off-the- shelf rat bait planted in steel tubes. The tubes are left lying on the ground so the rats can use them as hiding places, and eat the poison while waiting. This year's infestation was so bad that the vermin were spreading into a new housing estate nearby. The city, which disclosed the crisis last month, was unable to enter or clear the overgrown area because of a legal dispute about who owns it.

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