The lockdown rats: getting bigger and bolder
Joe Shute meets a catcher and his terriers to find out why the rodents are running wild during lockdown
At the beginning of The the 1947 dystopian novel by Albert Camus, the first sign ign that an epidemic has gripped the fictional town n of Oran is the rats, which appear r without warning. During the coronavirus lockdown, a similar phenomenon nomenon is being witnessed across ross Britain, with one crucial exception. ption. For while the rats of Oran emerged rged from the sewers to die on the streets reets in their thousands, during the Covid ovid pandemic they appear to be thriving.
According g to the British Pest Control Association, ociation, more than half of pest-control rol professionals have reported an increase in rat activity since lockdown own began at the end of March. With restaurants closed, many ny rat populations have been forced orced to abandon their city centre entre burrows and expand into o our homes and gardens in pursuit of food.
In recent t weeks, rats have been reported ted burrowing into cellars, clambering mbering up drain pipes and colonising compost bins. Rat wars have ave been reported as colonies attempt tempt to muscle in on rival turf. In some instances, they have even started eating each other.
A few weeks ago, rat catcher Martin Kirkbride rkbride was called to one such infestation tation in an insalubrious corner of Openshaw, Manchester. A tenant living ing in an upstairs flat had reported suddenly seeing so many rats that they hey were scuttling over his feet when n he opened the front door.
Kirkbride, ide, a 56-year-old former social worker rker – one of the only rat catchers in Britain to still operate using ratting ting dogs (in his case, a pair of Manchester hester terriers) – has received an upsurge in calls, with several a day in recent weeks.
On the e scene, he discovered the rats had moved into an abandoned Honda Jazz azz and established a colony in n its engine bay. He watched d as dozens scuttled out from the e car and down a nearby alleyway, where food from a Chinese takeaway was festering in an industrial bin.
“These were normal 12in 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 18in 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 – each around 14in from top to tail – 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
‘People have posted pictures on Facebook of rats they’ve seen that are 18in or more’
several times as they sniff around burrows – of jumping back. Martin explains 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. Our 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. Prof 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 away from their burrows when seeking new feeding sites. Hunger, he says, also makes them bolder, hence why more are being sighted in the daylight. It would also explain why they are being more aggressive towards 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 our 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,” says Belmain.
Among those who have discovered new neighbours is Chris Maume, the Telegraph’s deputy obituaries editor. A few days ago, he started noticing a strange “clanking sound” from the cellar of his East Dulwich home and, after going down to investigate, discovered 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 not when your intruder is large enough to run in the 2.30 at Kempton.