Rats around throughout the United States have turned to cannibalism and infanticide, as restaurants around the country have closed or continue to operate on limited hours, NBC News reports.
"It's just like we've seen in the history of mankind, where people try to take over lands . . . and fight to the death, literally, for who's going to conquer that land," Bobby Corrigan, a rodentologist who studies city rats, told NBC News. "A new 'army' of rats comes in, and whichever army has the strongest rats is going to conquer that area. When you're really, really hungry, you're not going to act the same — you're going to act very bad, usually."
To deal with the shortage of food, these rats have resorted to gang fights and even infanticide, to deal with the stress.
Rat sightings have become so common around the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has designated pest control as an essential business. When the city ordered all restaurants and bars to close their doors to sit down business March 16, the city's 311 city services line has received close to 500 calls about rats over a 30-day period.
"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," Corrigan said. "And those rats that were living by that restaurant [or] 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 choices."
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