In April of 2019, Gary was looking around online when he found himself on the Wikipedia

page for the Norway rat.

I don't know why, but something's legal down the rabbit hole and Wikipedia.

You start looking at pages and then someone on the rats and then you just go down.

The Norway rat, also known as a brown rat, a sewer rat and a common rat spreads disease

that feeds on garbage, bites, babies, damages, crops and climbs through sewer pipes and

up into toilet bowls.

It is the dominant rat in North America and Europe and it's at home the world over.

And illustrating this very fact was a little map included on the Norway rat's Wikipedia

page.

The page Gary was looking at.

You see the map, you know, the world map of where rats live.

On the map, everywhere the Norway rat lives was a fire engine red.

And everywhere it doesn't live was gray.

And except for some gray territory above the Arctic Circle, the whole map was bright red.

Because the Norway rat lives everywhere.

Or does it?

So then I thought to myself, huh, that's not right, there are no rats in Alberta.

The Canadian province of Alberta, where Gary grew up, sits just north of Montana.

On a map, it looks like a piece of construction paper with a lower left-hand corner torn

off.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Alberta launched a serious, effective, well-publicized rat

...