LOCKDOWN RATS GETTING BIGGER & BOLDER
Denied restaurant scraps, rodents are running wild during pandemic
At the beginning of The Plague, the 1947 dystopian novel by Albert Camus, the first sign that an epidemic has gripped the fictional town of Oran is the rats, which appear without warning.
During the coronavirus lockdown, a similar phenomenon is being witnessed across Britain, with one crucial difference. For while the rats of Oran emerged from the sewers to die on the streets in their thousands, during the pandemic they appear to be thriving.
According to the British Pest Control Association, more than half of pest-control professionals have reported an increase in rat activity since lockdown began at the end of March. With restaurants closed, many rat populations have been forced to abandon their city centre burrows and expand into homes and gardens in pursuit of food.
In recent weeks, rats have been reported burrowing into cellars, clambering up drain pipes and colonizing compost bins. Rat wars have been reported as colonies attempt to muscle in on rival turf. In some instances, they have even started eating each other.
A few weeks ago, rat catcher Martin Kirkbride was called to one such infestation in an insalubrious corner of Openshaw, Manchester. A tenant living in an upstairs flat had reported suddenly seeing so many rats that they were scuttling over his feet when he opened the front door.
Kirkbride, a 56-year-old former social worker — one of the only rat catchers in Britain to still operate using ratting dogs (in his case, a pair of Manchester terriers) — has received an upsurge in calls, with several a day in recent weeks.
On the scene, he discovered the rats had moved into an abandoned Honda Jazz and established a colony in its engine bay. He watched as dozens scuttled out from the car and down a nearby alleyway, where food from a Chinese restaurant was festering in an industrial bin.
“These were normal 12-inch (30-centimetre) rats, but there are some bigger ones knocking around,” he tells me, as we meet (at a social distance), by the entrance to the alley. “People have posted pictures on Facebook of ones they’ve seen that are 18 inches (46 cm), or more.”
As he speaks, his terriers, Drake and Izzy, strain at their leads, itching to get ratting. Drake, in particular, is interested in a nearby drain, at which he sniffs and yelps. The rat-infested car has now been towed away, so it’s presumed that the colony has shifted here.
“The thing about Drake’s nose is he is never wrong,” Kirkbride adds.
Live-baited and poisoned traps laid, we move on to the next location, a business park near Old Trafford. Here, in a car park next to a sandwich shop and a nursery, the bodies of two large grey rats lie prostrate.
Kirkbride laced their burrow with poison a few days previously, and has been called to retrieve the corpses. As he picks one up with a stick, Drake snatches it in his jaws.
“He has started eating them,” he explains, once he retrieves the rodent from the dog ’s grip, “which is not ideal.”
While he uses poison, Kirkbride says there is growing evidence of rat immunity and he is concerned about so-called “secondary poisoning” when animals such as owls eat the toxic bodies and themselves fall ill. He prefers to hunt with the dogs, as they are more effective ratters.
The hounds work as a team, one sniffing the rat out of its burrow and the other waiting to pounce.
Manchester terriers have evolved brown spots near their eyes to confuse rats trying to bite them, and have a strange habit — which I see several times as they sniff around burrows — of jumping back. Martin says this is a defence mechanism, because a rat always strikes first.
Kirkbride is a student of his quarry and has read numerous tales of the old rat catchers. The most prominent is Jack Black, who caught rats for Queen Victoria using teams of terriers and ferrets. Black gained near-celebrity status in London and wore a costume of white leather trousers, a green jacket and a rat-shaped belt buckle.
The rodents were a scourge of the Industrial Revolution, as overcrowded populations crammed into unsanitary urban housing. But if anything, Kirkbride says, the rat population in Britain’s cities is larger now. It’s just that we don’t tend to see them, as they live in the sewers and feed overnight on the calorific fast food we dump.
“They live with us and are here because of us,” he explains. “The more people there are, the more food there is for the rats.”
The story of the rat in Britain is similar to that of the squirrel. The U.K.’S traditional black rats — upon whose fur teemed the fleas blamed for spreading the bubonic plague — have, since the 18th century, been pushed to the very margins by an invasive larger species called the Norway rat.
Any estimate of population size is, experts say, a total guess — although they are prodigious breeders. Female rats have the ability to fall pregnant immediately after giving birth and are capable of producing around seven litters (each with an average of eight pups), a year. In order to conceive, they may mate up to 500 times with competing males in a matter of hours.
Steven Belmain is an expert in rodent behaviour at the Natural Resources Institute in Greenwich. He, too, has been on the receiving end of phone calls from members of the public experiencing rat infestations during lockdown.
He blames the shortage of discarded food in city centres, and says rats can move more than half a mile (almost one km), away from their burrows when seeking new feeding sites. Hunger also makes them bolder, he says, explaining why more are being seen in the daylight. It would also explain why they are being more aggressive toward one another.
“They are quite territorial, so will defend their patches as much as they can,” he says.
While rats are in no way related to COVID-19, Belmain says that the spread of rodents is a health concern to humans, as they can harbour numerous zoonotic diseases.
As lockdown eases, and the hospitality industry resumes, Belmain believes that most of the rats will return to their old burrows. But there is a concern that some colonies may continue to expand, seeing as they’ve already moved in.
“They are moving into residential areas and finding food sources there, so deciding to make it home,” Belmain says.
Among those who have discovered new neighbours is Chris Maume, the London Daily Telegraph’s deputy obituaries editor. He recently started noticing a strange “clanking sound” from the cellar of his Dulwich home and, after going down to investigate, found a rodent the size of a small cat.
“Even in the poor light, it was massive — the biggest rat I’ve ever seen,” he says.
He has taken matters into his own hands and laid a trap baited with cheese. Should that fail to entice the enemy in his midst, he is planning on switching to peanut butter.
Normally, he adds, he is content to live and let live. But these are not normal times particularly when the invader is roughly the size of its human counterpart.
They are moving into residential areas and finding food sources there, so deciding to make it home.