There’s rarely a time when rats aren’t in the news. Carriers of more than 50 diseases transferrable to humans, including listeria, salmonella and Leptospirosis (though not the Plague, that was animal fleas) numbers appear to be rising.
So are we are never more than 6ft from a rat? And are they even closer now? Estimating a largely nocturnal, subterranean population means figures vary wildly from 10 million to 120 million. In 2012, Dr Dave Cowan of the Food and Environment Research Agency debunked the ‘6ft myth’, calculating an average urban intimacy of around 164ft (50m). They may have crept closer since then.
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Rats share our habitats, habits and food, and although rare inside houses (around 0.5%) they live happily in gardens, alleyways and outbuildings, around the bins of restaurants and markets, sewers, farms and stables. The British Pest Control Association reports an increase in rat callouts in the last five years, exacerbated by a warming climate. Rats cease to breed and often die in the coldest winters, and we’re seeing far fewer of those.
With around seven litters of 12 pups a year (who can breed themselves at nine weeks old) one pair can create 1,000+ offspring in a single year of continuous breeding. Rats are also as fond of fast food as we are, with one in Teesside this year, measuring a whopping 56cm (22in) from whiskery nose to tail. Almost five inches larger than average, it was quite literally, the size of a cat.
Many global cities have reported a rise in rats, including Amsterdam and Toronto, and New York City even had a dedicated 'rat czar' between April 2023–October 2025, helping residents understand and minimise how and where rats live and thrive.
Rats are naturally cautious around anything new, or that immediately makes them ill. Traditional poisons take up to a week to kill the animal, through painful internal bleeding, and are fatal or detrimental to other species that find and eat them (pets, wood mice or bank voles) or through secondary poisoning, when those animals are eaten by others such as foxes and birds of prey.
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In rural areas, rats flourish around animal and human feedstuffs and agricultural buildings. A rat recently chewed a hole into my neighbour’s 400-year-old cottage and stole her oranges. We plug gaps with wire wool and keep animal feed in galvanised bins. But large, commercial pheasant shoots can exacerbate the problem. According to the Barn Owl Trust, 50% of food put out for 47 million pheasants released annually in the UK is eaten by rats. Gamekeepers introduce copious amounts of poison into the countryside in an attempt to control them, even as they are bound to encourage them.
The Barn Owl Trust advises poisons as a very last resort; that the real solution is to encourage (not kill) rats’ natural predators, while reducing access to food and harbourage. Particularly when rats are evolving immunity to these deadly poisons.
As anyone who keeps pet rats knows, rats are highly intelligent, clean animals with intricate social structures, capable of problem-solving and empathy (some experiments show their willingness to rescue each other from being trapped.) And talking of experiments, we owe the contents of our medicine cupboards to rats and their unconsenting sacrifice for our health.
From back alleys and bins, to farm barns, rats are, according to Joe Shute’s brilliant book, Stowaway; The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat, a mirror species, reflecting back to us our worst excesses. Any horror at them, should involve a long hard look at our own species.
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