ANOTHER RAT KING
Entangled Estonian rodents found stuck in a henhouse
It seems that rat kings are like buses: none for ages, then two turn up at once. Following hard on the heels of the unusual rat king discovered near Stavropol in southwest Russia ( FT412:4), a second has turned up, this time in Põlva County, Estonia, close to where the only other 21st century rat king was found in 2005.
The Stavropol rat king was unusual in that it was found in open country, well away from the region where most others have been discovered, and probably involved brown rather than black rats. The new king sticks to a far more traditional template: Estonia is in northeast Europe, which is where most other examples have come from – almost all have been found in Germany or neighbouring countries – and it was found in a henhouse on a farm, not in the open. Apart from the Stavropol rat king, all the others have been found in buildings. From examining the pictures, it is almost certainly made up of the more usual black rats as well. What is unusual about this one though, is that, like the Stavropol king, it was found while most of its 13 constituent rats were still alive and that video of it was taken (see https://bit.ly/3jPIEWu).
The rat king was found by qualified vet Johan Uibopuu and his mother when they went to feed their hens. “My mother went to feed the birds in the morning, opened the door, and the rats were in front of the door as if on a tray. They had burrowed a tunnel right in front of the door and gotten stuck in that tunnel. My mother could not do anything. I tried untying them, but it was quite complicated to understand if their tails were tied or if they were stuck to the underlay,” he said. Looking at the video, it appears that the rats’ tails are tightly enmeshed in a ball of debris from the henhouse floor that forms a solid lump at the centre of the entanglement. As it is very difficult for rats to move and feed when in a king, they are usually dead when found. In this king, the majority are alive but were apparently in poor condition. Andrei Miljutin, curator of the Tartu Natural History Museum where the rats were taken, said that it was unlikely that the remaining rodents would have lasted more than a day, so they were humanely euthanised and have now been added to the museum collection, which also houses the 2005 Estonian rat king. news.err.ee, 21 Oct 2021.
“I tried untying them, but it was quite complicated to understand”