The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rodents running wild in Paris; blame the European Union
New regulations have changed how rat poison is used.
PARIS — On chilly winter mornings, most Parisians hurry by the now locked square that is home to the beautiful medieval Tour St. Jacques. Only occasionally do they pause, perhaps hearing a light rustle on the fallen leaves or glimpsing something scampering among the dark green foliage. A bird? A cat? A puppy? No. A rat. No. Three rats. No. Look closer: Ten or 12 rats with lustrous gray-brown coats are shuffling among the dried autumn leaves.
Paris is facing its worst rat crisis in decades. Nine parks and green spaces have been closed either partly or entirely. Some, like the Champs de Mars, home to the Eiffel Tower, are being “deratisized” in sections.
“I haven’t seen this sort of situation in 39 years,” said Gilles Demodice, a manager in Paris’s animal pest control department, who has spent much of his adult life working for the city.
Some rat-infested places cannot be completely closed, like the shrub-filled Boulevard Richard Lenoir, which runs through a neighborhood with little green space and is beloved by mothers with strollers as well as joggers — but also, it seems, by packs of rats.
Rat invasion is an old problem in Paris — and a new one — and it is hard to get a grip on. In 2014, the city promised a 100 percent “deratization.”
In the 19th century, rats terrified and disgusted Parisians who knew that five centuries earlier, the creatures had brought the bubonic plague across the Mediterranean.
The plague ravaged the city, as it did much of Europe, killing an estimated 100,000 Parisians, between a third and half the population at the time. It recurred periodically for four more centuries. Not surprisingly, the experience left Paris with a millennium-long aversion to rodents.
Today, no one talks about a 100 percent rat-free Paris. But why is the problem worse now than in the past?
“We don’t know exactly why,” Demodice said. “I think it might be because there is an overpopulation underground because the usual habitat for this animal are the sewers, underground, not above ground.”
“Our work is to push them back down,” he said.
But why are they proliferating? Could it be everybody’s favorite scapegoat — the European Union and its faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats? Yes, it could.
New regulations from Brussels, the European Union’s headquarters, have forced countries to change how they use rat poison, said Dr. Jean Michel Michaux, a veterinarian and head of the Urban Animals Scientific and Technical Institute in Paris.
The old way of poisoning rodents involved a sort of deadly snack service in which park employees put lethal pellets directly into the burrows where the rats lived or sprinkled a poison powder along the underground byways used by the rats.
The poison would cling to the rat’s fur “and then when the rat cleaned itself, licked itself, it absorbed the powder and was automatically poisoned,” Dr. Michaux said.
Either method meant the rat was likely to come in direct contact with the deadly substance. Typically, the rat died two or three days later. The poison is an anticoagulant that eventually causes dehydration, internal bleeding and death.
However, the old method could easily contaminate the water supply, and the poison could be ingested by domestic animals or human beings, with the greatest risk being to children and pregnant women, Dr. Michaux said.
Now the European Union requires that the poison be secured in small black plastic boxes, known as bait stations, and the rats have to actively seek it out. The United States has similar restrictions.
In Paris, however, the rats can easily find a three-course meal much of the year within a stone’s throw of their burrows — at least around the Tour St. Jacques. And they appear to prefer a half-eaten baguette with butter and ham, a piece of apple and an unfinished container of pasta, prosciutto and peas.
Three park workers tasked with checking the poison boxes scattered every 25 feet among the shrubbery at the Tour St. Jacques did not find even one breached by a rat last Friday.
Patrick Lambin, 43, a city worker in the Square St. Jacques, gleefully seized a dead rat with a pincer-like implement used for picking up trash on Friday morning and swung it around.
“That’s the fourth one I’ve gotten,” he said.
Over how many days? He shrugged, “Since we began.”
That was between two and three weeks ago.
While it is possible the other rats running around the little square may be dying slowly from the poison, it seems at least as likely that they are propagating faster than they are dying.
The rat’s rapid reproduction rate is a reason that the creatures are likely to have the upper hand in the competition for survival.
“Rats are capable of breeding every three weeks,” said Dr. Michaux, the veterinarian.
“Sexual maturity by the children is reached between six and nine weeks, and so very quickly the second generation also starts reproducing, then the third generation and so on,” he said.
Taking into account that a rat mother produces on average four to five offspring in each litter, the numbers rise exponentially.
While the poison could be a risk to human beings, so are the rats — potentially, although no one is suggesting that the bubonic plague is likely to return.
The species of rat responsible for the black death, as the plague was called, Rattus rattus, a black rat that first arrived in Europe probably about A.D. 500, is not the rat now turning up in Paris parks.
The rat causing alarm in the French capital is the Rattus norvegicus, a relative newcomer to Europe, which arrived about 150 to 200 years ago from Asia. Although it is not easy to get sick from having a passing contact with these rats, they do carry diseases like salmonella or leptospirosis, more commonly known as swamp fever.
Dirt, disease, degeneracy, the poor rat is much despised.
Today’s brown-gray Parisian rat is also, if not man’s best friend, at least a familiar and constant denizen of city life: Where there are men, there are rats, said Demodice, the pest control manager.
Listening to Demodice, it is almost possible to feel affection for them.
“A rat is a very intelligent and athletic animal,” he said. “Rats play a very useful role for us because what they eat we do not need to dispose of, so it’s very economical for us, and when rats are underground they also clean the pipes with their fur when they run through them.
“So we need to keep them. They’re sort of our friends, but they need to stay below. That’s all we ask: that they stay below.”