Planet Of The Rats? A Global Sanitary Crisis Is Lurking Just Around The Corner

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — We can confirm it every day just watching them nonchalantly go about their business everywhere. The estimate today for all the rats in the world is about 4 billion, which makes them one of the planet’s most abundant species. In proportional terms, the ratio is, eerily, one rat for every two people.

While they might seem to live a lot longer, wild rats have a life expectancy of one to two years. In captivity, they can live longer, for up to three on average.

They have 6 to 12 pups per birth with a gestation process that lasts from 21 to 23 days after mating. Young rats reach reproductive maturity at three months of age, and their breeding period is very active, with the female rat typically having four to six pups per year.

Rats can transmit several diseases through any type of contact including their feces, urine, saliva, and bites. The most common diseases include leptospirosis, plague, hantavirus, salmonellosis, murine typhus, and rat-bite fever.

A rat-infested society is thus vulnerable and perhaps even terminally ill.

In addition to being dangerous and harmful to human harmony, they have lethal tendencies among themselves. 

In certain circumstances, rats may eat each other, especially when food is scarce or when the rodent population is very large. This cannibalistic behavior can be a survival strategy in extreme conditions due to food shortages, overcrowding, or stress and competition. 

More rats than people

They are often to be observed in public spaces and government buildings, and are especially concentrated in cities and urban centers. Usually, where there are people, rats live alongside them.

We shall probably stop talking about the Planet of the Apes and speak instead of entering the age of the Planet of the Rats.

At their current rate of growth, there will soon be more rats than people, and we shall probably stop talking about the Planet of the Apes and speak instead of entering the age of the Planet of the Rats. There will surely be a good script and a new production of a film about it, or a series on Netflix. 

Will power to act

The digital age and social media have also increased awareness — or is it our perception? — of their presence. If we already knew of their existence, now we see them at all times, everywhere, and in real time.

We are in the midst of a physical, and digital, invasion of rats.

We are in the midst of a physical, and digital, invasion of rats. They are devouring us exhaustingly and, like a nightmare, we seem bereft of all will power and unable to react.

If only we could follow here in Colombia the example of some of the biggest cities in the world where they are executing plans to substantially reduce their numbers. 

I wish we could find the antidote to control them. If only we could.