Northwest China, already suffering from desertification, has been training foxes to hunt out rampant rats blamed for destroying grassland and forests.

About 225 captive-bred foxes have been released to the wild in Ningxia Hui and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions and Shaanxi Province over the past four years to curb the fast reproduction of the rodents which eat grass and gnaw tree roots.

Trainers feed rats to young foxes in captivity to improve their hunting techniques. As they grow, they are taken to pastureland regularly to adapt to the natural environment.

The foxes have been doing well in the wild, reducing the number of rats by up to 95.7 percent in a mountainous region of Haiyuan County in Ningxia between 2003 and 2004, said Li Kechang, deputy director of Grassland Division of the Ningxia Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Department.

They also mastered the skills to burrow and some silver-black foxes freed from 2003 to 2005 have mated with wild red foxes.

Foxes are ideal ratcatchers, and are cheaper than poisons, which the rats can adapt to and endanger other animals, according to Li.

Rats have thrived in northwest China, partly due to global warming, some experts said. However, their natural enemies, such as foxes and weasels, are gradually disappearing due to human activities.

In addition, experts in Ningxia's Guyuan City have started to "recruit" weasels in the "ratcatcher force" this year.

(Xinhua News Agency September 1, 2007)