Starving, Angry and Cannibalistic: America Rats Get Desperate Amid Corona Lockdown

[Elderberry]

Strange Sounds 4/17/2020

America’s rats are being hit hard by Corona.

And as many businesses like restaurants and grocery stores have closed or limited operations, rats are in dire survival mode.

A restaurant all of a sudden closes now – which has happened by the thousands in not just New York City but coast to coast and around the world.
The rats that were living by that restaurant, some place nearby, and perhaps for decades having generations of rats that depended on that restaurant food, well, life is no longer working for them, and they only have a couple of grim choices:

•   cannibalism

•   rat battles

•   infanticide

It’s just like we’ve seen in the history of mankind, where people try to take over lands and they come in with militaries and armies and fight to the death, literally, for who’s going to conquer that land.

And that’s what happens with rats. A new ‘army’ of rats come in, and whichever army has the strongest rats is going to conquer that area.

More: https://strangesounds.org/2020/04/rats-cannibalism-infanticide-america-coronavirus-lockdown-video.html

[Smokin Joe]

Reminiscent of:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636191/

The urban animal: population density and social pathology in rodents and humans

Unwanted social contact occurred with increasing frequency, leading to increased stress and aggression. Following the work of the physiologist, Hans Selye, it seemed that the adrenal system offered the standard binary solution: fight or flight.2 But in the sealed enclosure, flight was impossible. Violence quickly spiralled out of control. Cannibalism and infanticide followed. Males became hypersexual, pansexual and, an increasing proportion, homosexual. Calhoun called this vortex “a behavioural sink”. Their numbers fell into terminal decline and the population tailed off to extinction. At the experiments’ end, the only animals still alive had survived at an immense psychological cost: asexual and utterly withdrawn, they clustered in a vacant huddled mass. Even when reintroduced to normal rodent communities, these “socially autistic” animals remained isolated until death. In the words of one of Calhoun’s collaborators, rodent “utopia” had descended into “hell”.3

Those rats had plenty of food, just not enough space.
(Calhoun JB. Population density and social pathology. Sci Am. 1962;306:139–48) Study now behind a paywall.

Maybe the exterminators will only have to mop up, and get rid of the fat ones...