Rat season is approaching!!
Late summer, early fall is the time of the year that rats begin to look for a warm secure home. Your home can be the next Bates Hotel if you allow these vermin to access the walls and attic. Here are twenty facts that you should know about rats.
1 A female rat can mate as many as 500 times with various males during a six-hour period of receptivity—a state she experiences about 15 times per year.
2 A rat that has a lower calorie diet has a longer life span.
3 Rats’ front teeth grow 11.5 – 12.5 cm each year. Rats wear them down by gnawing on everything from cement to other small animals.
4 A rat can tread water for three days and survive being flushed down the toilet. There is approximately one rat per person in Canada.
5 The Norway rat or brown rat, and the black rat, are worldwide, due to their ability to stow away in ships.
6 Of the 56 known species, many live in remote habitats like marshlands and rain forests.
7 A Hindu temple in India, houses more than 20,000 rats.
8 The favorite foods of city-dwelling brown rats include scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, and cooked corn.
9 Rats eat their own feces for the nutritional value.
10 A pair of brown rats can produce as many as 2,000 descendants in a year.
11 A rat matures sexually at age three to four months. An average rat’s life span is two to three years.
12 Jacko, a 13-pound bull terrier, set a record in 1862 when he killed 100 rats in 5 minutes, 28 seconds.
13 A rat can fall as far as 50 feet and land uninjured.
14 “Drats” is a short form of “od rat,” a euphemism for “God rot,” which is used like “Goddamn.”
15 If you were born in 1912, 1924, 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, or 1996, then you’re a rat.
16 Rats regulate their temperature by constricting or expanding blood vessels in their tails.
17 Rats transmit fatal diseases to humans, including viral hemorrhagic fever, plague, Weil’s disease, and Q fever.
18 It is rare for a human to get rabies from a rat.
19 Rats have belly but no gallbladders or tonsils
20 In 2006 scientists created a brain chip out of rat neurons.
http://www.delta-optimist.com/opinion/blogs/deltabc-1.983313/blog-rat-season-is-approaching-1.2024225
