‘The whole back of my HiLux was covered in rats’: what to do about Sydney’s growing vermin problem?

Nobody really knows how many rats live in Sydney but, like in other cities around the world, numbers are high and growing. Photograph: Pixel-shot/Alamy

Nathaly Haeren has seen patios in Sydney collapse because brown rats have tunnelled under and created sinkholes. She’s been electrocuted in the roof of a house after they chewed through air conditioning wiring. She’s even visited a hairdresser where they’d gnawed a circle through double brick.

More recently, Haeren has started seeing rats standing in the street in the middle of the day, “oblivious” and unbothered – like they just don’t care.