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Claim: Major cities harbor rodent populations equivalent to one rat per person.
Example: [The Washington Post, 2002]
Origins: I confess: I like rats. Or, at least, I don't dislike rats. My wife keeps rats as pets, so I'm used to having rats around me, used to seeing rats loose in our house (during their occasional exercise periods), and even used to the sensation of rats crawling on me. They're intelligent, 
clean, quiet, sociable, and even affectionate in their own way, so I don't mind their presence in our household. If I found a wild rat coming up through our toilet, I would probably go into near-panic mode as I searched frantically for a container with which I could trap it and hustle it outdoors, but pet rats don't bother me at all.
Still, there are many people who are absolutely repulsed at the sight of any rat and will run screaming even from the tamest Rattus norvegicus. This reaction is due in large part to our culture's association of rats with filth, poverty, disease, and death. Rats are the furtive invaders who hide in the dark, dank spaces of our buildings and towns, emerging en masse after dark to feed on garbage and food scraps. They can carry disease, either directly or via the insects that feed on them (such as the fleas whose bite spread the bubonic plague). Although in the wild they're shy and prefer to avoid contact with humans, they have long, narrow teeth housed in strong jaws that can deliver powerful defensive bites when necessary. Rats tend to live where humans live, since the presence of man generally creates an abundance of food and shelter. Because rats live for the most part out of the sight of people and usually emerge from their dwelling places when we're either asleep or not around to see them, it's easy to imagine that far more of them are lurking in those impenetrable dark spaces than really are there. We create maxims that are far more reflections of our anxieties and fears about feeling surrounded by unseen crawly things than they are accurate estimators of populations Another statistic in this vein is the "one rat per person" rule The "one rat per person" claim stems from a study of rats conducted in England by W.R. Boelter and published in 1909 under the title The Rat Problem. Boelter surveyed the English countryside (but not villages, towns, or cities) and came up with an educated guess, estimating that England had one rat per acre of cultivated land. Since England had But Boelter's estimate may have been way off the mark, and even if it was accurate, the putative 1:1 ratio between people and rats derived from it was merely coincidental, an artifact of England's just happening to have a human population equal to its number of cultivated acres. "One rat per person" was a figure unique to the time and place in which Boelter conducted his study, not a generalized figure that could be applied everywhere. Nonetheless, as Sullivan noted, "People loved that statistic, maybe because they abhorred it," and the figure is still frequently cited in news articles dealing with rat control efforts in large metropolitan areas, particularly New York City:
E. Randy Dupree, who oversees the [New York City] Health Department's Bureau of Pest Control, says his agency is taking a closer look at the problem. But he said people must take some responsibility for making the city a place where rats thrive. "If people took better care of their garbage and their property, there just wouldn't be as many rats as there are," he said.
Even figures several orders of magnitude higher than "one per person" are sometimes quoted in reference to New York's rat population:
He added that there are about eight million rats living in the five boroughs. "That's about one rat per person," he said.2
Life in the big city is a rat race, and it looks as if the rats are winning.
Just how many rats are to be found in a large city like New York? Far fewer than one might think:
City health officials believe there are several times as many rats in New York City as people "There's no official rat census," says Pamela Miller, a deputy city health commissioner. "The estimates are anywhere from one rat per person to
In 1949, [rodent control expert] Dave Davis analyzed New York's rat population and called the one-rat-per-human statistic "absurd." He had just completed a precise calculation of the rat population of Baltimore
Additional Information:  Rattus norvegicus (University of Michigan)
Last updated: 17 April 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2009 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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