The Rise of British Super Rats

Photo from Flickr

While I usually like to stick to more upbeat stories and stories about domestic rats, I do still like to keep up with general rat knowledge and information, too. For instance, I recently read this 2009 article about British “super rats.” It seems that poison is the typical means of extermination within the country, but just like with overusing antibiotics, overusing specific poisons has allowed for the development of resistance in the overall rat populace. Basically, some of the rats had a genetic predisposition against the effects of poison and, since they’re the only ones to survive said poisons, they’ve begun to breed and spread their resistant traits. So now most of the feral rat population is almost unaffected by traditional rat poisons.

I love rats, but I can definitely see why this is such a huge issue. In the country, large rat populations can affect crops, while in cities, they can infest homes and damage buildings. If there’s no longer an effective way to control their population, they could easily overrun everything. According to the article, most people have since turned to slightly less elegant forms of extermination – everything from traps to guns and dogs. While it does come across as fairly brutal, I imagine a trap general means a much quicker and less painful way to die than certain poisons. Not that any of it is very nice, of course.

I attempted to find an update on the issue, but I can’t seem to find any articles regarding UK super rats past 2009. Whether that means that a solution’s been discovered or that people have just learned to deal with it remains a mystery to me.