Is It True That There Is One Rat Per Person In The UK?
Hammer Tech has heard it said that there is one rat for every person in the UK. But is this true? We thought we would look into it and find out more.
The claim was started by W.R. Boelter and published in 1909 with the title The Rat Problem. He asked people in rural England to estimate how many rats there were and they guessed that there was one for every acre of cultivated land. He didn’t ask people in towns, cities or villages. At the time the UK had around 40m acres of cultivated land, similar to the human population.
Most of what is currently published relates to the US with data for the UK lacking. Information comes from individual’s impressions after working with the problem. More is going to be known about numbers in urban areas where they are causing a problem as they are more likely to be tracked and trapped. Numbers in arable and undeveloped land such as forests and national parks are less likely to be known as rats are timid and will hide. They are less likely to cause a problem in these areas meaning that they won’t be trapped.
The phrase ‘one rat per person’ has since been quoted many times but has also been dimissed by people who have claimed that the number could be much more, or much less. In 1949 a pest controller was working on six blocks of flats in East Harlem in New York. He found rats living mostly in kitchens and bathrooms; apparently more people thought they had rats than actually did. It would be possible for several people to report the same rat and for rats to move between units through floors, walls and ceilings. In the end he estimated that there was 1 rat for every 36 people, or 0.028 rats per person. Here is a useful article on how many rats there are in the UK; https://pestpurge.co.uk/rat-census-how-many-rats-are-there-in-the-uk/
Conversely Pamela Miller, a Health Commissioner in the US, says that estimates are between 1 and 10 rats per person and believes that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. So the consensus is that it lies between 0.028 and 10 per person but that it probably isn’t 1.
By Dr Toby Bateson for Hammer Technologies Ltd