Rats have a somewhat unfortunate tendency to enjoy living where people live. That’s how a biologist tried to explain people’s hatred for the rodents in a television news feature about rats gnawing electrical cables in parked cars in the southern Swedish town of Malmö.
The brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, is one of the species best adapted to modern society. These rats have followed humans around the world to become one of the most abundant mammals, spreading from their native distribution in northern China and Mongolia and reaching Europe in the 1500s, possibly even earlier. Black rats, however, arrived in Europe as early as the 1st century AD.
