In an evil moment (1872) Mr. W.B.  Espeut conceived the idea that it would be a good thing to introduce mongooses to the rats of Barbadoes and Jamaica that were pestering the cane-fields to an annoying extent.  It was done.  The mongooses attacked the rats, cleaned them out, multiplied, and then looked about for more worlds to conquer.  Snakes and lizards were few; but they cheerfully killed and devoured all there were.  Then, being continuously hungry, they attacked the wild birds and poultry, indiscriminately, and with their usual vigor.  I have been told that in Barbadoes “they cleaned out every living thing that they could catch and kill, and then they attacked the sugar-cane.”  The last count in the indictment may seem hard to believe; but it is a fact that the Indian mongoose often resorts to fruit and vegetable food.

In Jamaica, at the end of the rat-killing period, the planters joyfully estimated that the labors of Herpestes had saved between 500,000 pounds and 750,000 pounds to the industries of that island.  That was before the slaughter of wild birds and poultry began.  I am told that up to date the damage done by the mongoose far exceeds the value of the benefit it once conferred, but the total has not been computed.

Up to this date, the mongoose has invaded and become a destructive pest in Barbadoes, Jamaica, Cuba, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Nevis, Fiji and all the larger islands of the Hawaiian group.  It would require many pages to contain a full account of each introduction, awakening, reckoning of damages and payment of bounties for destruction that the fiendish mongoose has wrought out wherever it has been introduced.  The progress of the pest is everywhere the same,—­sweeping destruction of rats, snakes, wild birds, small mammals, and finally poultry and vegetables.

Every country that now is without the mongoose will do well to shut and guard diligently all the doors by which it might be introduced.

Throughout its range in the western hemisphere, the mongoose is a pest; and the Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture has done well in securing the enactment of a law peremptorily prohibiting the importation of any animals of that species into the United States or any of its colonies.  The fierce temper, indomitable courage and vaulting appetite of the mongoose would make its actual introduction in any of the warm portions of the United States a horrible calamity.  In the southern states, and all along the Pacific slope clear up to Seattle, it could live, thrive and multiply; and the slaughter that it could and would inflict upon our wild birds generally, especially all those that nest and live on the ground, saying nothing of the slaughter of poultry, would drive the American people crazy.