subject: Rats And Mice [print this page] Rats have adapted so successfully to a lifestyle entwined with ours that we can hardly call them wild animals. Just like us, they are both intrepid travelers and house dwellers. Quintessential freeloaders, they eat our food, give us their diseases, live in our homes, and skulk about the premises. The more we try to beat them back, the more they are with us. From luxury liners to city sewers, if we build it, they move in.
Rats can reproduce at prodigious rates and endure incredible physical challenges. In a year, a rat can have between 30 and 80 offspring, depending on the species-one pair could generate 15,000 rats in their life span. Described as "more cunning than man," a rat can fall fifty feet with no injury (it flattens its body for resistance and lands on its feet), climb a pipe only an inch and a half in diameter, squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter, tread water for three days, dig four feet straight underground, and survive an atomic bomb test. Is it any wonder we can't get rid of them?
Rats and mice destroy tons of food, causing millions of dollars in damage each year. By urinating and defecating in food, they ruin vastly more than they eat, and it has been estimated that they destroy 20 percent of the world's food supply every year. Although their favorite food is grain, they survive beautifully on anything we eat and can even subsist on manure and urine. Rats are compelled to gnaw to wear down their constantly growing incisors, and they can chew through bone, wood, plaster, brick, asphalt, and metal.
Rats (and mice) chewing through the insulation in wires probably cause a majority of unexplained fires. They bite thousands of people every year, most often small children, and they spread at least thirty-five diseases, including typhus, salmonellosis, dysentery, Lassa fever, tapeworm, hookworm, rat bite fever, LCM virus (a form of meningitis), and bubonic plague. No wonder they have been called the "lapdogs of the devil."
The Norway rat, also called the brown rat, gray rat, wharf rat, sewer rat, or wander rat, is the most pervasive species in the United States. A large (seven to ten inches), aggressive specimen, it prefers urban areas, likes water and damp places, and lives at ground level or underground in burrows and sewers. Its tail is shorter than its body.
The roof rat, or black rat, also called the house rat, ship rat, and "baretail squirrel," is a great climber and lives in dense vegetation, trees, vines, and attics, liking coastal towns and rural areas. This agile rat infested ships, exploiting its ability to climb ropes. It uses its tail, which is longer than its body, almost as a fifth leg. Also called the plague rat, this is the nefarious rat that carried the Black Death, or "Sword of God," in the fourteenth century, killing 25 million people in Europe alone.
