PARIS, France — Both Nadine Mahe des Portes and the rat panicked. She had accidentally stepped on the creature as she walked down a Paris street.
"I heard a terrible squeak," she recalled with a shudder. "I thought I'd stepped on a child's toy or something."
When Parisians are literally tripping over rats on the sidewalk, their city has a problem. Professional exterminators with years on the job cannot recall a time when Paris had so many rats.
The city has been forced to close several parks because of the rat population explosion. Squirmy clumps of rats are brazenly feeding in broad daylight, looking like they own the place.
Rats Take Center Stage In City Parks
On Friday, city officials opened one of the closed parks, the Tour Saint-Jacques square, to show journalists their latest anti-rat drive. The park is in the heart of the city and is only a short walk from the Pompidou art museum. Two Japanese tourists thankfully did not notice the rats in bushes just in front of them when they stopped to ask for directions.
The furry princes of the city were all over the park. They sauntered across the footpaths and merrily grazed in the undergrowth. They seemed far more bothered by pigeons competing with them for breadcrumbs than by the people walking past.
Rodents Avoid Baited Traps
The rats also seemed totally uninterested in recently laid traps baited with poison.
The park attendant, Patrick Lambin, said this morning's inspection of the park had turned up just one dead rat.
Before the park was closed in November, rats hunting for food hung like grapes off the trash bins. They regularly scampered through the children's play area, creating panic, Lambin said.
Lambin suspects the problem has been made worse by Parisians and tourists who leave food out for the pigeons. In particular, he blames a homeless man who swings by most mornings with bags of stale bread.
The rats are "profiting" from all the food left out for pigeons, he said.
They Thrive Day And Night
Gilles Demodice, who has spent 39 years as an exterminator, said he had rarely seen anything quite like the current situation.
"A few years back, you'd not see so many rats during the day," he said. "Now it's night and day, all the time — so it's a big worry."
New rules governing which poisons and traps can be used have complicated the job of extermination, Demodice explained.
He said exterminators used to drop biscuits of poison directly into rats' nests and then seal the nests up. However, that method is no longer allowed, and exterminators have been forced to lay black plastic boxes of poison among the bushes. For the most part, rats simply ignore the boxes.
The new method is "a lot less effective" than the old one, Demodice said.
One Rat Couple Can Produce Hundreds Of Offspring
It is anyone's guess how many millions of rats now live in Paris.
Reynald Baudet works in the city's most famous pest-control store and has spent 30 years in the business. He notes that because one rat couple can produce hundreds of offspring, the rat population can grow quickly if it is left unchecked.
Baudet's store has dead rats hanging in its window and rat traps decorating its Christmas tree. The store appeared in cartoon form in the movie "Ratatouille," the animated tale of Remy, a Paris rat with dreams of becoming a chef. "The war must be total," Baudet said.
Source: Newsela
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