Interesting Facts

According to the Kennel Club, in the UK more than 10,000 dogs a year are poisoned after eating everyday items such as onions, grapes, paracetamol and chocolate. (Between 2010 and 2014 56,000 dogs were treated for poisoning. Painkillers were the most common cause of poisoning, followed by rat and mouse bait, and chocolate. Chewing gum, laundry detergent, sultanas, grapes and raisins along with onions, garlic and leeks all cause health problems that can be fatal to our 4-legged friends.)

Scientists from Norway's University of Oslosay, say the Black Death may not have been caused by rats. (The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hypothesises that it could have been spread by gerbils who arrived from Asia. Poor rats. They always get the blame for everything.)

According to a study carried out at the  University of Tokyo, compared with 13 other mammal species studied, African elephants have the most genes related to smell: 1,948. (That's more than twice the number of olfactory genes in domestic dogs and five times more than in humans. The following animals were tested in the battle of the schnozes:- Elephant - 1948 Rat - 1207 Cow - 1196 Mouse - 1130 Horse - 1066 Dog - 811 Guinea Pig - 796 Rabbit - 768 Human - 396 Chimpanzee - 380 Marmoset - 366 Macaque - 309 Orang-utan - 296 So, why don't we use sniffer elephants or even sniffer rats?) Source - The Wright Stuff

According to a study carried out at the University of Minnesota, in the USA, rats experience regret when their actions make them miss out on better food options. (Scientists believe that the emotion of "regret" is unique to humans, and is different to disappointment.  Prof David Redish said, "Regret is the recognition that you made a mistake, that if you had done something else, you would have been better off. The hard part was that we had to separate disappointment, which is just when things aren't as good as you hoped. The key was letting the rats choose. Funnily the dictionary defines regret as a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment.)

According to research from from the University of Leicester, rodents could evolve to fill niches as larger mammals go extinct. (The largest extinct rodent known to science was Josephoartegasia monesi. It lived three million years ago, was larger than a bull, and weighed over a ton. Like its modern-day relative, the sheep-sized capybara, it lived in South America. Gigantism is a well known evolutionary response that occurs when a small creature steps into an ecological niche left by a larger species. Rats the size of sheep!  If that isn't a good enough reason to protect the elephant, rhino and other species from extinction, I don't know what is.)

According to research from the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute, the effects of smoking can be passed on to future generations. (The study was carried out on rats, but a rat’s physiology is sufficiently similar to a human’s to suspect the same thing may be true in Homo sapiens. In a nutshell, Dr Rehan showed that if pregnant rats are exposed to nicotine, not only will their offspring develop asthma induced by nicotine, so will the offspring of those offspring, neither of whom had been directly exposed to nicotine.) Source

Rodents used to weigh a tonne and have skulls half a metre long. (This means they would have been as big as a bull. So much for Roland rat.)

Rats smell in "stereo" - the rodents' brain responding differently to smells from the left and right. I can't even see in stereo.

Rats are good swimmers. One this week was caught after it staged an escape across 400m of open ocean. (All that swimming around in open sewers obviously paid off.)