My beloved Xaghra: Rat capital of EU

Xaghra is infested with the ex-Qortin rats, and any claim to the contrary is misleading. The rats that originally roamed the village's streets and terrorised the inhabitants have moved underground.

WasteServ would like to have us believe that once it found the proper poison formula, the rats left at il-Qortin died and the problem was solved. But what about the thousands that made it to idyllic Xaghra?

WasteServ's strategists miss several important points about rats and their behaviour. Rats migrate as a band. They lived as a clan at il-Qortin and migrated out of it as a clan.

Just like human beings do. When the Gozitans migrated to Australia, they migrated in a clan. And when they stopped migrating, they practically all stopped.

When Malta joined the EU, the whole human clan joined, dragging in with it the previously kicking-and-screaming Labour Party which realised that its own survival must trump over its economic vision for Malta.

When WasteServ closed il-Qortin at the snap of a finger and littered the site with lethal 20-minute-life poison, it instantly took the vast food menu away from the rats. So, they migrated to Xaghra. This puzzled WasteServ.

WasteServ's Christopher Ciantar had studied somewhere that "the Norwegian rat... only emigrated in a range of 50 metres." So when the rats emigrated all the way to Xaghra, WasteServ was at a loss.

What Dr Ciantar didn't realise is that the rat would stick to 50 metres only when his stomach is full.

Just like Gozitan villagers traditionally stuck to their village in the evening once they finished their day toiling in the surrounding fields.

This is how our village band and football clubs came about, under what the rats would term the 50 metre rule, if rats could talk.

This is how the Sultanas, Attards, Bajadas, Refalos and Xerris multiplied within Xaghra.

But when the food is gone, humans will wander off for endless kilometres in search of food as we occasionally witness in the heartbreaking photos from famine spots in Africa.

The rats do the same. The 50-metre rule doesn't apply to hungry rats.

A lot of the rats that migrated to Xaghra did not ingest poison on their way out of the defunct Garden of Eden.

If they did they wouldn't have made it to several of Xaghra's streets but would have died within 20 minutes of their last meal, within the circumference of the vast landfill.

As one reader of this newspaper observed, The Times' photo of the rats in Xaghra was a picture of health, not moribundity.

According to Dr Ciantar: "The (Qortin) rats were cunning enough to realise their friends were dying after consuming the poison, so another method had to be used. This time a poison that kills off a rat within 20 hours (as opposed to 20 minutes) was used."

Dr Ciantar fails to realise that by the time the 20-hour poison was released in il-Qortin, the clan had already migrated to, and settled in, Xaghra, and it was mostly the weak, the loners and the disoriented that were left behind in il-Qortin for the 20-hour dessert.

Dr Ciantar assumes that the situation is now under control.

But it isn't. It's simply a case of out of sight is out of mind.

What happened is that within three days of roaming in Xaghra (well beyond the 20-hour limit, too), the clan burrowed out of sight and the rats are busy establishing and furbishing a new colony underground, watered by the village's dripping, damp and faulty septic system.

Rats multiply rapidly with many female rats giving birth after only a few weeks on mother earth.

Given Gozo's Mediterranean climate, the Norwegian rats will find Xaghra a pleasant habitat all year round as they craftily sneak up to the surface for their occasional morsel.

The Norwegian rat's worst enemy is the brutal harsh winter that grips many foreign cities. No such problem for the rats in Xaghra.

The Minister for Gozo and the mayor of Xaghra chimed in, assuring us that all the rats have been killed in the most professional way.

While the wise rats look for dense cover, politicians come out into the limelight and make a meal of themselves on centre stage.

When the jellyfish infestation problem first appeared in Maltese waters around the late 1970s, the Socialist controlled media announced that patrol boats were circling around Malta to control the problem! How the problem was to be controlled, they didn't elaborate.

They probably hoped the jellyfish would just go away with a change of current and reap credit for the patrol bluff.

Likewise, every time a big fish is spotted in our waters, the tiny patrol boat allegedly goes out searching for the fish. How the patrol boat will submerge itself underwater like a submarine to give chase for the fish, I don't know.

In Gozo's infestation history, from jellyfish to rats, truth is always the first thing to be annihilated at the hands of the politicians.

Over the years, Gozo has witnessed a select band of pied pipers who can charm fellow voters into a clan through delusive enticement.

But no pied piper has been found as yet for the Xaghra rats.

If WasteServ had been more cunning, it would have cut off the fresh trash supply at il-Qortin very, very slowly and simultaneously littered the environs with different types of poison for different taste buds.

Not just pistachios, take-it-or-leave-it.

Even so, curbing a rat colony in a landfill is always a challenge and blame should not rest solely on WasteServ.

In il-Qortin the nightmare was of our own creation when decades ago we Gozitans did not stand up against the creation of this politically imposed nonsense from the Maltese authorities.

Instead we divided into two clans, one red, one blue, pilloried by petty tribal politics.

Amidst our division, the dilettantes ruled and created an empire for the rats.

The rats of il-Qortin were smarter than us when they moved as one clan.

Evolution history demonstrates that survival doesn't pertain to the intelligent or the healthy. It pertains instead to the flexible.

In dumping il-Qortin for a new life in untested Xaghra, within a matter of hours, the rats demonstrated phenomenal flexibility.

The future belongs to them, the underground Xaghra United.

The moral of all this is captured beautifully in the 1998 bestseller Who Moved My Cheese? penned by Spencer Johnson.

In the book, fictitious mice and human beings live in one part of a maze where cheese is freely abundant.

All of a sudden, the cheese disappears. The mice immediately leave and migrate to a distant part of the maze where, in their search, they find enough cheese to sustain themselves.

The humans, on the other hand, fall into some sort of depression and paralysis by analysis.

The humans feel that the world owes them the cheese, and that the cheese was unfairly taken away.

So they spend endless days arguing and philosophising about all this as they grow weaker and hungrier.

They resist moving away from their lifelong homes and huddle in depression to the point that they lack the energy to walk away when hunger becomes fatally unbearable.

The mice, on the other hand, stripped away from their emotions, and never feeling sorry for themselves, are busy enjoying their new life, in new areas of the maze.

As the jobs in Gozo continue to evaporate, and as stringent EU rules take out whatever edge Gozo enjoyed under the country's insular laws, hundreds, if not thousands, of Gozitan victims behave like the humans in the maze.

They philosophise. They theorise. They pontificate over diluted tea in the bars.

They listen to the politicians who tell them what they want to hear.

Never mind that our political parties are no economic role models themselves, perpetually bankrupt, begging for charity over the airwaves, competing with the handicapped and the missionaries for the charity lira.

Instead of competing with healthy businesses.

Yet, many foolishly continue to listen to them, believing that they have an economic plan for Gozo and its wonderful inhabitants when the politicians can't even keep their party's finances in the black.

The only difference between a party in opposition and a party in government is that the party in government has the power to tax. It is the power to seize and plunder by decree.

No economic models are needed to explain this.

It's the powerful against the weak.

The pirates and the corsairs against the poor Gozitan farmers out by themselves in the countryside. The feudal lords against the Gozo peons.

From feudalism to Nationalism, the change is only in the "-ism".

History repeats itself. Again. And again.

Which is why we are deluded into believing that time stands still in Gozo.

Perhaps, in the midst of all this, the rats in Xaghra - whose new colony will never be annihilated - should be a source of inspiration rather than desperation.

Their flexibility should be mimicked to the best of human abilities as Gozitans take their own skills and capabilities to more prosperous lands within the European Union and start a new future for themselves and their loved ones.

In the words of Spencer Johnson, "Move with the cheese... The quicker you let go of old cheese, the sooner you can enjoy new cheese."

Joseph Bonnici sends this article from his burrow in Rhode Island, USA, where he still hasn't found a perfect substitute for fresh cheeselets.

jbonnici@bonnicilaw.com