Rats have become a burden in Paris as of late, often seen scouring around popular tourist sights, restaurants and museums. When Geoffroy Boulard, mayor of the 17th arrondissement in the northwestern part of the city, attempted to have something done about the rodent infestation, to his great surprise, he encountered resistance. Ten members of the local lobby group showed up to protest the planned poisoning by exterminators: they proposed a more humane treatment of animals through the distribution of birth control.
The local lobby called Rattus Norvegicus is active and vocal. Eighteen months ago, the city began to implement regularly scheduled exterminations, the group gathered close to 26,000 signatures to the online petition posted as a sign of protest. Rats are prospering and multiplying with the current estimate of 1.8 rat-to-human ratio. Paris rats have an abundance of food left behind by crowds of tourists and locals who aren’t careful about disposing of garbage properly. The labyrinth of underground tunnels left from the days of Roman Empire gives the creatures space to roam free.
Aside from protecting the wellbeing of rats, there is a small group of citizens who take them in as pets and rehabilitate them if they are injured. Claudine Duperret houses homeless rats and has organized a 600-member Facebook group, which she calls Rat-Prochement: Save the Rats. She lives with 3 such companions – Mousty, Leon and Milou. She proposes that people need to find a way to live together with the rodents and believes that the stigma is overhyped. Ms. Duperret’s rats live in cages and are released one by one to run free in her apartment. She states that “rat phobia” is pervasive and unwarranted dating back to the Middle Ages when rats were believed to have carried the fleas that transmitted the plague and wiped out close to 60% of European population. Ms. Duperret took in her first rate eleven years ago when her young daughter asked for a pet and has rescued 25 animals thus far. She brings them around with her in the city and on vacations.
Most rats that are rescued by the members of the group were pets and then got abandoned and released on the streets. They occasionally encounter albino species which have either escaped or been let go by the laboratories. After the release of the Disney movie “Ratatouille” in 2007, which told a story of a country rat who became a restaurant chef, many city children asked for a pet rat resulting in a surge of rodent purchases. Despite the portrayal in books and film, rats don’t make cuddly pets, and kids soon abandoned them. That’s when Ms. Duperret organized efforts to take in the unwanted animals.
Not all rescues go smoothly. Another activist, Olga Bugni-Livolsi, who is a member of the Save the Rats group took in an injured rat and rehabilitated it over time. But the animal could not be tamed and after destroying two cages, chewed a hole in a wall. It did not upset Ms. Bugni-Livolsi or diminish her admiration of the rodents. “We’re not asking people to love rats like us,” Ms. Bugni-Livolsi says. “What we’re asking is for people to reduce the number of rats without killing them.” It remains to be seen whether the groups like Rattus Norvegicus and Rat-Prochement gain further traction among Parisians to protect the rodents or the citizens will speak up to cull the population and prevent further growth.
Feature Image via Flikr/brianna.lehman
