Starving rats are resorting to war and cannibalism to survive coronavirus lockdown

Even rats, one of nature’s most resilient creatures, are struggling to survive the coronavirus pandemic.

As of Monday morning, over 525,500 Americans have been confirmed positive for COVID-19, with some 20,000 deaths as a result, according to the latest numbers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Efforts to curb the outbreak have forced the temporary closure of 1 in 4 small businesses across the country, the US Chamber of Commerce said last week, with another 40 percent planning to shut down within the next two weeks.

And while it is not known how the virus may directly impact the health of individual rats, the toll the outbreak has taken on the human economy has driven rats, which have thrived on Earth for some 160 million years, to desperation. Just as humans are using any available resources to  obtain suddenly scarce foodstuffs, rats, too, are getting scrappy over our scraps.

“A restaurant all of a sudden closes now, which has happened by the thousands in not just New York City but coast to coast and around the world,” Bobby Corrigan, a rodentologist who specializes in urban rats, tells NBC News. “And those rats that were living by that restaurant, some place nearby, and perhaps for decades having generations of rats that depended on that restaurant food, well, life is no longer working for them, and they only have a couple of choices.”

The fight over the few rat habitats which have maintained their flow of food waste has prompted the most barbaric acts of bloodshed and warfare, including cannibalism, death matches and infanticide.

To put the rat’s grim predicament in anthropological terms, “it’s just like we’ve seen in the history of mankind, where people try to take over lands . . . and fight to the death, literally, for who’s going to conquer that land,” he says. In this case, “a new ‘army’ of rats come in, and whichever army has the strongest rats is going to conquer that area.”

“When you’re really, really hungry, you’re not going to act the same — you’re going to act very bad, usually,” he says. “So these rats are fighting with one another, now the adults are killing the young in the nest and cannibalizing the pups.”

In New Orleans, where they’re already plagued by vermin thanks to a subtropical climate and ample tourism, a citywide lockdown to halt the spread of COVID-19 has coaxed rats even further out into the public — demonstrated by a viral video shared in March showing a dozen or so rats congregating on Bourbon Street to find the few remaining morsels of discarded food.

“What we have seen is these practices are driving our rodents crazy,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell said at a press conference in March. “And what rodents do, they will find food, and they will find water. That puts our street homeless in dire, dire straits. And that’s why I’m so laser-focused on it right now.”

The Times-Picayune reported that the city’s Mosquito, Termite and Rodent Control Board will work aggressively to cull the rat population “for at least the next month.”

Corrigan tells NJ.com that certain urban zones will be hit harder than others, particularly where rat populations were already considered a nuisance, as well as properties that neighbor food businesses that have recently closed. He advises neighbors in those communities to take extreme care with their waste disposal, especially during this time, by taking care not to rip the trash bag and tightly securing the lid to their dumpster outside.

The pest expert pointed out that rats need just a half-inch of space to squeeze through walls, gates and other barricades. “We don’t want those animals in our apartments, houses, restaurants or grocery stores because you end up playing disease lottery if that happens,” Corrigan warns. “You don’t want any one of those 55 diseases.”

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