Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region has trained foxes to hunt the rats destroying pastureland and forests, local authorities said Monday.

"More than 50 foxes have been roaming 500,000 hectares of pastureland in Ningxia's Yanchi County since 2008," said Ma Jianjun, an official in charge of pastureland management in Yinchuan, the regional capital.

Rats ravage pasturelands, gnawing at grass and tree roots.

Ma said the foxes have helped curb the rat population in Yanchi.

Ningxia was the first Chinese locality to use a fox army to keep rats at bay. It has a training base at a nature reserve in Yunwushan Mountain where captive-bred foxes are trained to prey on rats in the wild.

Trainers at the base feed rats to the young foxes to improve their hunting techniques. As the foxes grow, they are taken to pasturelands regularly to adapt to the natural environment.

Foxes trained in Ningxia are also at work on pasturelands in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, said Ma.

Foxes are recognized as ideal rat-catchers because they are cheaper than rat poison and less harmful to the grassland ecology.

This year, 5.5 million hectares of grassland in Xinjiang -- at least 10 percent of the region's total -- has been overrun by disease-infested rats.

In Inner Mongolia, rat plagues are threatening more than 9 million hectares of grasslands.

Experts, noting that rats are more adaptable to dry weather, have blamed the rat plagues on persistent drought and grassland degradation.

(Xinhua News Agency September 14, 2010)