Map shows the most rat-infested places in the world

Rats aren’t the best roommates. They definitely won’t help pay the bills. Nor will they ever replace the leftovers they eat.

They nibble on sleeping people, carry about 60 diseases and can survive being flushed down the toilet.

There are barely any places in the world where these four-legged vermin don’t exist. So unless your big city job will let you work from home out in the Arctic, you might have to get used to seeing rodents run over your feet.

The French ranking website Topito has revealed the top 10 rattiest (yes, that’s really a word) places in the world.

Many rat hotspots are seeing far milder winters – the result of climate change – make it easier for rats to survive and reproduce.

While their thriving tourism gives them the onslaught of rats an almost endless buffet of leftovers and rubbish to feed on.

10. Marseille, France

Bottom of the list – but still sufficiently ratty – is Marseille, a port city in southern France. With up to 1,400,000 rodents thought to call the city home.

Wooden snap traps, glue and poison are pest control experts’ usual go-to’s for getting rid of rats, but city officials in 2022 unleashed an army of ferrets to help trap ‘at least 100 rats per week’.

9. Atlanta, Georgia

Not quite taking the title of Rat City USA is Atlanta (or is it Ratlanta?), the capital of the state of Georgia.

It’s been slowly creeping up the ratty ranks for years, something experts say is down to climate change, rubbish waste management and the city’s human population getting denser by the day.

8. Johannesburg, South Africa

Rats have plagued Johannesburg for years, with reports of rats freely scurrying into homes to gobble up food and nibble on electrical cables.

In 2016, giant rats at a three-month-old baby girl alive after her mother left her home alone to go partying.

7. Guangzhou, China

Guangzhou, a port city northwest of Hong Kong, has a thriving fishing scene. So much so that even rats have been spotted casting a line.

Locals have described rats breaking through windows and chewing on their food and unedible valuables. As one said: ‘Now I hide all my valuables for fear that those rampant guys will bite them into pieces.’

6. Hamelin, Germany

While a certain US city lower down this list is infamously known for its rat infestation, it doesn’t quite have a legend dating back to the Middle Ages all about how ratty it is.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin, the tale of a piper leading lines of rodents before luring children, had sadly put this Lower Saxony town on the map.

5. Singapore

Deanne Baptista, manager of a Singaporean pest control company, told The Straits Times of the time she walked into a wet market that stank of rotting rats.

Vendors had placed dozens of traps only to forget where they placed them. It’s a scene that might become more common as one type of rat that calls the city home can multiply from two to 2,000,000 if left untouched.

4. Paris, France

Not exactly surprising to see the French capital on this list, given there’s an entire movie about how rat-infested it is, Pixar’s Ratatouille.

Paris has a population of roughly 2,100,000, but the number of rats exceeds 6,000,000. In other words, if war broke out between humans and rats, every Parisian would have to fight three rats.

3. New York City, New York

Rats have ruled New York City for centuries. They board the subway, shop for luxury bags and, of course, emerge out of people’s bathroom sinks with a gleeful squeak.

The city is teeming with so many rats that officials employed its first ever ‘rat czar’, a job advertised for people with ‘the drive, determination and killer instinct needed to fight the real enemy: New York City’s relentless rat population’.

2. London, England

Only last month, footage that went viral on social media captured the skin-crawling moment dozens of rats spewed out of bins in east London.

There are about two rats for every Londoner, or roughly 19,000,000 furry fiends, with each female producing 60 babies every year. It’s safe to say pest control companies are in high demand in the capital.

1. Deshnoke, India

But the ratropolis of the world Deshnoke, a city in Rajasthan, India where one of the first images that comes up when you Google it is of rats drinking from a bowl.

The photograph is from the Karni Mata Temple, a sacred Hindu temple known locally as the ‘Temple of Rats’ for its 20,000-strong rodent population – devotees call the rats ‘kābā’ and are considered holy.

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