The risks rats pose are hugely overstated, including in this very thread. Most of the world has rats -- often enormous numbers -- but we have functioning agriculture, aren't dying of weird rat diseases, etc. Notably Alberta has the same mice problem as everywhere else, and mice are a much greater threat[1]. I live in Ontario -- a warmer, much hospitable, more populous place than Alberta -- and rats somehow present zero concern in my life, despite the absence of any real control initiatives.
This is all mostly just geographical and time happenstance that baked in a situation and norm. Rats actually aren't native to North America but were introduced with Europeans. They then slowly spread, and Alberta made the choice to stop rats before they took hold in the province. So they started at zero and that made efforts to stop them from taking hold easy if sustained, especially given the brutal winters and inhospitable geography for rats.
[1] - Elsewhere someone referenced hantavirus, yet the overwhelming percentage (basically 100%) of cases of that are from mice in living spaces. Mice like the deer mice that are found throughout Alberta.
Agreed. Rat populations have regulatory mechanisms that generally prevent them from overshooting with respect to the resources available in their environment.
>In my field, there’s an equation that best explains rat population size. Simplified, it states: Garbage in = rats out. When food is plentiful, there’s no check on growth. When the cycle of regular feeding has been broken, then rats will disperse, injure, kill and even consume one another.
Rat colonies are the exception, they usually live as "nuclear families", separated from each other. Walk 100m away from a metro station with trashcans containing a dozen of rats near the entrance, and you'll find rat families, not colonies.
However the damages they can cause when they settle inside our houses tend to let us think this is their default modus operandi, and as a consequence we tend to project an exterminatory mindset onto situations where they are not problematic–and I'd even add: situations where they are a necessity.
In particular, if you have a compost box, you'll have a rat family settle nearby, and you shouldn't obsess over it unless you have good reason to fear an invasion (it already happened or you have crops drying in a shed, or something like that).
Saying this as someone who both owned rats at some point and have a dachsund/pinscher who killed hundreds.
And another crowd, whose advice i tend to ignore - urbanite animal experts. The same crowd that in germany gaves us the go ahead for the reintroduction of the beaver, cause surely a terraforming animal that tends to flood valleys will not clash with a densely populated country, with tons of villages and towns in little valleys.
Well I was talking about urban rats. I used to live in a neighborhood where people would throw dishes out of their windows on a daily basis. Like clockwork, a rat family would settle nearby. What's best ? Having rats or meat miasmas ?
And no, fining people for this behavior isn't an option in a neighborhood with stolen bikes burnt every other day, drug dealing spots every 400m, squats, empty cash register lying on the ground, etc ...
This is all mostly just geographical and time happenstance that baked in a situation and norm. Rats actually aren't native to North America but were introduced with Europeans. They then slowly spread, and Alberta made the choice to stop rats before they took hold in the province. So they started at zero and that made efforts to stop them from taking hold easy if sustained, especially given the brutal winters and inhospitable geography for rats.
[1] - Elsewhere someone referenced hantavirus, yet the overwhelming percentage (basically 100%) of cases of that are from mice in living spaces. Mice like the deer mice that are found throughout Alberta.