Life History of the Kangaroo Rat
by Walter P. Taylor and Charles Taylor Vorhies
Life History of the Kangaroo Rat – As the serious character of the depredations by harmful rodents is recognized, State, Federal, and private expenditures for their control increase year by year.
These depredations include not only the attacks by introduced rats and mice on food materials stored in granaries, warehouses, commercial establishments, docks, and private houses, but also, particularly in the Western States, the ravages of several groups of native ground squirrels and other noxious rodents in grain and certain other field crops.
Nor is this all, for it has been found that such rodents as prairie dogs, pocket gophers, marmots, ground squirrels, and rabbits take appreciable and serious toll of the forage on the open grazing range; in fact, that they reduce the carrying capacity of the range to such an extent that expenditures for control measures are amply justified.