Rats often access cavities and spaces in buildings that provides them with food, warmth and shelter.

Although they choose live indoors primarily during the colder winter months, if the availability of food and shelter offered is generous they can take up year round occupancy.

Being social animals, rats live in groups. When indoors they may construct nests within wall voids, in roof voids, under floors and even within stored food.

Rats as Pests

Rats are regarded as pests for 3 main reasons:

Eating and Contamination of stored food

Rats are responsible for enormous losses of food in store, either by directly eating the foods or by rendering them unfit for consumption through contamination via droppings, urine and hairs.

Physical Damage of Property through Gnawing

The constant gnawing by rats can cause serious damage to a range of materials. They can damage doors, skirtings, and other parts of buildings, upholstery, books, food containers or packaging and parts of equipment or machinery. The gnawing of wires and cables has caused breakdowns of telephone and computer systems as well as short circuiting, which can result in equipment breakdown and, at worst, very costly fires.

Transmission of Diseases

Rats can pose a serious threat to human health and can transmit disease to humans by a variety of means:

1. Contamination of food or utensils with rodent urine or faeces resulting in diseases such as Salmonella food poisoning (bacteria carried by mice and rats), Weil's disease, infectious jaundice (bacteria), tapeworm.

2. Contamination by direct contact of urine or faeces where bacteria enters the skin through small scratches.

3. Indirect contamination via blood sucking insects like fleas & ticks. Example: bubonic plague, and murine typhus fever.

4. Indirect contamination via pets to humans. Example: favus, skin disease.

5. Contamination by directly biting humans. Example: relapsing fever.

6. Indirect contamination by being eaten by an intermediate carrier. Example: trichinosis (worm- infested rodent eaten by pig which becomes contaminated and is then eaten by human)

 

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