Rat Of The Week (2)

A pest controller removed an enormous dead rat from a property in Normanby in North Yorkshire recently. It was twenty-two inches long, longer than five tins of baked beans positioned lengthwise or the average cat without a tail, even larger than the 21-inch Dorset mega rat discovered in 2018.

Big and certainly unwelcome in any home as it is, the Normanby rat is a pale shadow of the Timor giant rat, Corophomys musseri, fossil evidence of which has been found in the Indonesian island. As an adult it weighed about six kilograms and was the size of a small dog. It became extinct some two to one thousand years ago, mainly because of human activity, clearing forest to make way for farm land and being eaten as a delicacy.

Rats, though, are becoming an increasingly major problem globally. A study published in Science Advances in January 2025 showed that rising temperatures and population have led to significant increases in rat numbers in eleven global cities. Numbers have increased by 390% in Washington DC, 300% in San Francisco, and 186% in Toronto. Britain is experiencing the same conditions which allow rats to thrive elsewhere, warmer temperatures, and increasing urban populations creating more waste, and they are becoming an increasing nuisance.

Rats, the study reported, damage infrastructure, consume agricultural produce, and contaminate food supplies, causing an estimated US$27 billion in damage annually in the United States alone. They also harbour and transmit to humans more than fifty zoonotic pathogens and parasites to humans. Highly fertile, theoretically capable of conceiving every 25 days, rats are mobile, adaptable and, if necessary, can survive on as little as an ounce of food a day.

It looks as though, unless we adapt a taste for them like our ancestors in East Timor, rats are going to be with us for a long time. After all, we are never more than six feet away from one, so they say. Let us hope, though, that the Normanby whopper is an outlier.