Owls used to eradicate rodents in Bengkulu

The Bengkulu provincial government is promoting the use of owls to combat rodents in rice-producing centers in the province, local agricultural office director Mangsury Thaib said here on Saturday.

Mangsury said his office had recently provided a number of owls to Seginim and Seluma villages in South Bengkulu to fight the rodents, and the results had been very satisfactory.

"The rodents almost disappeared from the two villages after the owls were released there," Mangsury said, adding that local farmers had expressed their appreciation for the assistance.

He claimed that one owl could dispose of at least one hundred rodents per day. Mangsury expressed the hope that farmers in Bengkulu would lose their traditional fear of owls and be willing to have the birds in their villages.

He also called on the local people never to hunt owls as the amount of money needed to purchase a well-trained owl was quite high.

The Bengkulu provincial government has been promoting the use of owls to eradicate rodents for the past three years, in addition to the conventional use of sulfur and other chemical substances.

The use of owls to eradicate rodents has also been applied recently in other places, including Yogyakarta, where local governments have also been releasing non-venomous snakes to combat the rodents. -- Antara