Rats: Little Terminators of Your Home

Rats are surprisingly destructive! From being the disease-carriers that historically spread the bubonic plague, to the physical damage they can inflict on your home, an infestation of these pests can be very detrimental to your family.

Dangerous Diseases 

Rats are often carriers of various, serious diseases including Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome, Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome, Lassa Fever, Lymphocytic Chorio-meningitis, and Salmonellosis. These rodents are notorious for climbing around in garbage and slinking through sewers… eventually finding their way into your home. As they scurry through your rooms, around your furniture and on your countertops, defecating and leaving behind remnants of urine and saliva as they do, they are contaminating everything they touch and putting you and your family at risk of some seriously detrimental diseases.

Chewing Through Your Investments

Rat teeth grow at a surprisingly rapid rate and, as such, they have to chew on things for roughly 28 minutes a day in order to grind down their teeth – otherwise, their teeth would grow to the point where they cannot even close their mouths. The bite pressure of a rat’s jaw is 24,000 psi, while a wolf’s bite has a pressure of only 1,400 psi. This means rats can even chew through metal!

Risk of Fire

One of the most concerning things that rats will sometimes chew through, are electrical wires. In some cases, this can actually cause the wires to spark into a fire. There have actually been a series of unfortunate cases in which rodent tampering has caused houses to burn to the ground.

Rats Are Not Your Friends

While domesticated rats make fantastic pets, wild sewer-rats are far from your friends. They may not directly mean you harm, but their interference in your life can completely destroy your home and put you at extreme risk health-wise. It’s important to call in experts to help you deal with these little Terminators if you ever find them in your home.

Citation: 

Diseases Directly Transmitted by Rodents (2017) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases & The Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology. Available at: https://www.cdc.gov/rodents/diseases/direct.html (Accessed: April 2020).