"There is no beast stronger than a cat!" - says the mouse rat in the famous fable I. The great Russian fabulist lived in those patriarchal times, when a decent public saw rats only in the stables, and the ladies fainted at the word "rat". Then, indeed, there was no need to distinguish which animal of the mouse family rodents was carrying grain from barns: a larger and more aggressive rat or a small shy mouse.
Over time, the mice remained in their niche of small plunders of field products. But the rats followed the man to the top of the food chain. Gradually it turned out that food spoilage is the least evil they cause. Humanity has barely got out of the pit of plague epidemics started by rats. They coped with the plague at the cost of not only millions of lives, but also priceless civilizational losses.
Both in the New and in the Newest time, a four-legged trifle (maximum weight up to 500 g with a length of up to 35 cm) causes enormous damage to humanity. At the end of the twentieth century, it was estimated at tens of billions of dollars a year, and in recent years, it has ceased to be assessed - insurance companies pay, even if their head hurts. And how to evaluate the gobbled up insulation of a powerful cable if there has not been a short circuit yet? Or the hole the rats gnawed through the concrete of the two-meter collector? If cats live “with a person”, then rats live “against a person”, and at the same time they feel good. They are not very afraid of poisons, there are no predators capable of removing them, man provides waste for food, what else does a grasping animal need to reproduce and reproduce?
1. The official political career of the English scientist Bertrand Russell was killed by rats. In 1907, Russell was nominated for the British Parliament from the Liberal Party. The key point of the liberals' program was the support of suffragists - supporters of full equality for women. Accordingly, the audience of the meeting, with which Russell opened the campaign, mainly consisted of the fairer sex. Simultaneously with the beginning of the speech of the young candidate for parliament, several dozen huge rats appeared in the main aisle of the hall. Screeching and panic forced the meeting to close, and Russell never tried to enter politics in the traditional government again.
2. In 1948, the US military evicted people from the Marshall Islands, which they inherited from the Second World War. The islands in the Pacific Ocean, which had a population of several dozen people, seemed to people from the Pentagon to be the ideal place for nuclear tests. The first atomic explosion, according to the predictions of scientists, was supposed to destroy all life on the atoll, so the researchers landed on the Enewetok Atoll, over which the explosion occurred, only two years later. To their surprise, not only some plants survived on the island - the atoll was swarming with rats, apparently escaping in underground burrows. Moreover, no genetic changes were found in them, and the mechanism of adaptability to the environment allowed the rats on Eniwetok to double their lifespan. It was then that there were suggestions that in the event of a cataclysm fatal to humanity, rats will inherit the Earth.
3. Despite the fact that every year thousands of people die from rat bites and hundreds of thousands are injured, there are many rat lovers who prefer rat society to human society. Often these people are completely sane from a legal point of view, and the authorities have to be sophisticated in order to somehow cope with such lovers of wildlife. In Chicago, in the late 1970s, local authorities still responded to complaints from residents of one of the rather prestigious areas. Neighbors complained about the mother and daughter, who arranged a whole rat world in a relatively small house - after they calculated that about 500 rats lived in the house. Women, the oldest of whom was 74 years old, and the youngest 47, literally stood up to protect the rats with their breasts. When the police nevertheless decided to enter the house, the floor of which was covered with a layer of excrement several centimeters thick, the women attacked them with fists. The television crew fled - the rats attacked them so purposefully, as if they knew exactly who was the source of evil in the modern world. Sanitary workers entered the house only after the cops killed several dozen rats - before that they were afraid. It was not easy for them - they had to take out a ton of rat waste from the house of the "Rat Ladies".
4. The most monstrous disaster for the Emperor of France Napoleon Bonaparte was, as you know, the battle of Waterloo, after which he lost all chances to retain power. However, having managed to survive the Waterloo human, Napoleon died as a result of the Waterloo rat. On the island of Saint Helena, where the deposed emperor was exiled, the rats felt so at ease that they climbed on the table right during lunch. An attempt to have chickens on the island ended in failure for the birds - the rats learned to climb trees and knocked down the jumping chickens that tried to fly away. An attempt to poison rats only worsened the situation - there were no less rodents, but a terrible stench was added to the troubles from them. Once Napoleon found a rat even in his favorite cocked hat. So it is quite possible that the disease from which Napoleon suffered and died cruelly was caused by rats.
5. Stories of how rats stole and devoured banknotes could fill an entire book. Most nutritious in nominal terms, rats lived in the palace of the sheikh of the United Arab Emirates. In the 1960s, the British began to pay insignificant amounts to the colonial princes - for themselves - for the oil produced on the territory of the sheikh. Payment was made in cash in bags. Knowing nothing of either the golden toilets or the Rolls-Royces, the ruler simply folded the bags under the bed. The rats made it to the unfortunate pounds and destroyed 2 million pounds. Taking into account inflation, the amount would now be 30 million. And smaller thefts with eating money are happening all the time.
6. Rats carry at least 35 diseases dangerous to humans. At the same time, the rodents themselves are classic carriers - their organisms practically do not suffer from diseases (with the exception of plague). And there is no guarantee that the list of already detected diseases is exhausted. In addition to the long-known typhoid, leptospirosis and fevers, diseases that could be called exotic, if not for tragic endings, were discovered relatively recently. In the late 1970s, several fishermen died of an unknown infectious disease in New York. It turned out that they were amazed by the so-called. Weil's disease is an infection that is found in rat urine. They fell into the soil, with the ground they were devoured by worms, on which the unlucky fishermen caught fish.
7. Some scientists believe that in terms of their impact on society, the plague epidemics caused by rats and fleas living on them have no analogues in history. Plague epidemics (there were 85 of them in total) caused both quantitative (the population and the number of cities decreased by tens of percent) and qualitative changes in human society. In particular, it is most likely that it was the plague-induced reduction in the number of workers that led to the abolition of feudal dependence in Europe.
8. Rats are capable of rapid reproduction. If we proceed from pure mathematics, then one pair of rats and its offspring can produce more than 300 million individuals in three years. At the same time, external natural factors do not influence the reproduction of rats too much. Nature has taken care of limiting the population of these rodents “on the other side”. As soon as the number of individuals reaches a certain value, part of the flock leaves it, part becomes so aggressive that it quickly dies, and part of the life simply decreases. As a result, the average lifespan of a male rat is about 6 months, while females live a little longer.
9. Of course, this does not in any way justify the rats and the damage they cause, but they gnaw everything and not only in attempts to get to food. They are forced to do this by constantly growing incisors. They need to be grinded at 14.3 and 11.3 cm, respectively, every year. This is a matter of vital necessity - even if the incisors deviate so as not to rest against the other bones of the skull, due to their length, they will be unsuitable for their main function. In addition, some rats use the resulting grinding sound as a rangefinder radar, capturing sound reflected from external objects.
10. Rats are very well developed physically. They can climb sheer, bare walls. They can crawl inside smooth vertical pipes if the inner diameter is suitable (you can rest your back against the opposite pipe wall). Rats jump a meter in length and height. When falling from a great height, they land on four legs. Police patrol boats on the Hudson River in New York once watched as three rats for three hours, without stopping and avoiding approaching ships, swam across a wide river from one side to another. The sailors saw several times floating rats in the wreck of ships that sank in the open sea three days ago.
11. The "Rat King", who in the Middle Ages was portrayed as a rat sitting on the intertwined tails of dozens of other rats, is indeed sometimes encountered by people. In fact, these are several rats whose tails are entwined to the point of coalescence. There can be up to 32 of them. Scientists last observed such rats in 1963. The most adequate hypothesis for the appearance of “rat kings” could be the assumption about the too rapid growth of the cubs that did not have time to untwist their tails, but it is difficult to believe in such a growth rate of the rat pups. According to the apt expression of one of the researchers, now scientists know about "rat kings" as much as medieval peasants knew.
12. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, rat sports were extremely popular. However, the rodents acted in them exclusively as an object - they were poisoned by dogs. Reports on the competitions were published in newspapers, and fights with rats were held for all segments of the public - this "sport" remained the only legal one among the bloody. Accordingly, the accompanying industry developed: catching rats and selling them to the owners of rat "stables". In London alone, the demand for rats reached 2,000 a week. The United States did not lag behind, and even mixed politics with the rats. In some states, rat-baiting was prohibited, and the organizers of this kind of entertainment were arrested by the police, while in other states a ticket for the baiting could cost up to $ 100. Trained dogs - bull terriers predominated among champions - could kill several hundred rats in an hour and a half. And the most famous fan of rat-baiting was Charles Darwin.
13. People have long tried to involve various animals - their natural enemies - in the fight against rats. Some attempts were even successful at first. For example, in cities, cats limited the distribution area of rats well, and mongooses and birds of prey fought well in fields with rodents. But none of the living means of fighting rats helped to win a complete victory. The mongooses in Hawaii were the closest to success. They really drove the rats into their burrows and did not allow them to protrude, but only during the day. At night, the rats, albeit with caution, still harm the fields. And the mongooses, thinning the population of rats, took up other small animals, and began to exterminate them, significantly reducing the diversity of the island's fauna.
14. The best rat-catcher was and remains a man. The profession of the rat-catcher in the Middle Ages was respected; the fighters against rodents had guilds and privileges. In Frankfurt, Germany, a Jew who presented 5000 rat tails to the authorities acquired equal rights with other citizens. The material incentive gave good results, but ideology or belief, according to the authorities of India or China, worked much more efficiently - 12 million rats were exterminated in India, and the Chinese communists, led by Mao Zedong, even reported on one and a half billion destroyed enemies of crops and barns. There were some curiosities - on the Indonesian island of Java, a marriage license could be obtained by bringing 25 rat tails. Artificial tails began to be sold in artisan workshops, and in response to the demand for a whole carcass, whole rat farms appeared.
15. On July 20, 1944, at 19:00, Berlin radio was to broadcast a short news bulletin. Instead, the Germans were stunned by the news that Hitler had been assassinated. As a result of the explosion, the Fuhrer was not injured, there are only minor bruises and burns. There was no more news, and the radio station, canceling the program schedule, began broadcasting military marches. A discussion on methods of fighting rats was announced in advance.
16. In a newspaper in the American state of Illinois, an article was published that contained an extremely profitable project of a combined cat and rat ranch. In the neighboring territories, it was proposed to simultaneously raise 100,000 cats and a million rats. It was proposed to breed cats for skins, which cost 30 cents. You can feed cats with the meat of the offspring of rats, which reproduce four times faster than cats. Rats, on the other hand, should eat the meat of cats that have already been skinned. This wonderful cat-rat cycle looked so innocent that the article was reprinted by the leading newspapers of the state. They began to receive letters, the authors of which were interested in where you can make a contribution, and what is its maximum amount. To the credit of the author of the note, he remained anonymous, and in fact, in 1875, in which his outstanding, without exaggeration, opus was published, not such scams were carried out in the United States.
17. Back in 1660, the Englishmen Robert Boyle and his namesake Hook conducted half-medical, half-biological experiments with black rats. Later, their colleagues noticed that in two years all the processes that take place in the human body from birth to old age take place in the rat's body. For several centuries, the rat has been one of the most important animals for clinical trials. Hundreds of millions of rats are used for research every year. The Charles River Laboratory in the USA alone sells up to 20 million experimental rats annually. The drugs, first studied in rats, are used for surgical operations and gunshot wounds, colds and ulcers, diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases. In fact, only a perfectly healthy person can boast of not having dealt with drugs tested in rats. Moreover, this big man has not yet to receive a single vaccination.
18. As always in the fight against natural phenomena, democracy with the classical change of power and other achievements, in the fight against the invasion of rats is powerless. In many states of the United States, rat control has gone through a series of similar stages. At first, rats made their way from industrial areas to poor residential areas. Then the rodents entered the middle-class quarters, which usually determine the policy of local authorities. There was a stir, which sometimes rose to the national level. In the 1960s, demands to defeat the rats coincided with the African American civil rights struggle.Martin Luther King and his brethren scoffed at "We Demand the Rat Bill!" - they say, our problems are more important than children bitten by rats. Then the allocation of funds for the fight against rats was still pushed through. As a result, in the states that received money for an average of $ 50 per person, the rat problem was solved. But Congressmen are elected on average every two years, and the number of rats recovers in a year. On the next budget, the rats were forgotten and quickly returned to the nutrient bins. In Berlin in the 1920s, regular campaigns not only fought rats, but also regularly fined the owners on whose territory rats were noticed. Illegal draconian fines only made rats reappear during World War II.
19. Rats have a keen sense of smell, and theoretically it can be used for various purposes, such as finding explosives or diagnosing diseases. However, directing rat activity into a beneficial channel often comes with such associated costs that traditional methods are much cheaper and more practical. Roughly the same can be said about the replicated ability of rats to think logically, predict events and unite collective efforts. This, however, does not prevent scientists from receiving research grants again and declaring rats almost the crown of evolution.
20. In northeastern India, in the states between Myanmar and Bangladesh, an unexplained natural disaster occurs about once every half century. After flowering bamboo, a variety of which blooms in this area once every 50 years, black rats destroy the entire harvest of rice and other grains. Bamboo begins to bloom in the south. Flowering gradually moves to the north. Likewise, millions of black rats move under the peasant fields to harvest the entire crop in one night. This disaster was noticed back in the 18th century, but it is still impossible not to interpret it or to resist it. Both the British and the central government of India helped the locals who lost their crops, but it is still impossible to get rid of the rats. The government in Delhi annually announces a reward of 2 rupees (a rupee at a rate of one less than a ruble) for the tail of a rat. Rodents are killed in tens of thousands, and in a normal year this is a good extra money for local residents, but in the year of the rat invasion, even he does not guarantee survival. And for the next half century, black rats practically disappear from the local fauna, accounting for only 10% of the entire rat population.
