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

Even rats are waging a bloody battle to survive the coronavirus pandemic.

A feeding-ground lockdown is driving New York City’s infamously resilient rodents to acts of war.

“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,” Bobby Corrigan, a rodentologist who specializes in urban vermin, told NBC News. “A new ‘army’ of rats comes 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.”

More than 525,500 Americans have tested positive for COVID-19, resulting in some 20,000 casualties, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Efforts to combat the spread of COVID-19 have forced the closure of 1 in 4 small businesses across the country, the US Chamber of Commerce reported last week, with another 40 percent planning to shut down within the next two weeks.





“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,” Corrigan said. “And those rats that were living by that restaurant [or] 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 resulting survival instinct is so strong, they’re even eating their own kind. “These rats are fighting with one another; now the adults are killing the young in the nest and cannibalizing the pups,” Corrigan said.

In New Orleans, where they’re already plagued by rats 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 told 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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