In defence of rats

I n the ranks of unloved animals, rats are surely king – so reviled that other pest species are often referred to as variations of the rat archetype: pigeons are ‘rats with wings’, grey squirrels are ‘tree rats’. There was also a recent flurry of stories about Britain facing an ‘invasion’ of ‘300 million monstrous super-rats capable of gnawing on steel and chewing through concrete’.

Yet how reliable were these stories? The 300 million figure is from Steven Belmain, a Greenwich University professor, who was simply giving his estimate of the rat population. (Probably an underestimate, he says, but there has never been a proper survey.) Nor is there any evidence that our rats are changing in size or nature. It’s been known for some time that they’re increasingly resistant to poison, but the bigger problem for the pest control industry is that poison may be banned anyway, due to concerns about it spreading into our water and food chains.