Iran battles giant rats with sniper squads

The rats are reportedly of a mutant variety that are larger than cats and are resistant to poison.

Iran battles giant rats with sniper squads
Mutant rats: A young volunteer picks up a dead rat from an open drainage channel in Tehran. IMAGE
 

The rats are reportedly of a mutant variety that are larger than cats and are resistant to poison.

Iran has a rat problem. And sniper squads are trying to take care of it.

Abu Dhabi's The National reported Monday that Iran had deployed sniper teams for the first time to tackle Tehran's burgeoning population of rodents, which some say are a form of mutants that can resist poison and are even bigger than cats.

Tehran city officials told state media that 10 sniper teams armed with infrared scopes caught more than 2,000 rats recently, but The National called that number "a drop in the ocean."

Tehran reportedly has more rats than its 12 million human inhabitants. The rat problem is so severe that a newspaper once published a cartoon of a rat telling a human, "Our numbers are more than yours, so you leave Tehran."

The BBC reported in 2000 that Tehran launched a new scheme to combat an estimated 25 million rats by importing tons of rat poison. But it looks like the scheme didn't get rid of the pests and the city has now resorted to more drastic measures.

"It's become a 24/7 war," the head of Tehran municipality's environmental agency, Mohammad Hadi Heydarzadeh, said on state television last month. "We use chemical poisons to kill the rats during the day and the snipers at night."

Nearly 1 million rats are exterminated in Tehran every year, according to media reports, with Tehran city authorities launching multi-million dollar campaigns to curb the problem every year.

Ismail Kahram, who advises Tehran's city council on environmental issues, told the website Qudsonline.ir that the rats seemed to have a genetic mutation.

"They are bigger now and look different ... These are changes that normally take millions of years of evolution," he said, adding that the rats were now larger than Tehran's cats, with some weighing up to 11 pounds.

The pests flourish in warm weather, when the snows on the nearby Alborz mountains start melting, raising the level of water and pushing out the rats from their subterranean habitat.

Rats are common in the roadside streams along Ali Asr, the Middle East's longest street, which is packed with restaurants and food stalls and extends from the more expensive neighborhoods in north Tehran to the poorer southern suburbs, where the rat population is reportedly six times greater than the human population, according to state media reports quoted by The National.

The rats that are killed by snipers are burned or buried in lime.

Scientists at Huddersfield University in West Yorkshire, England said in a study that about 75 percent of rats in Bristol, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire in the U.K. are mutating to become more resistant to commonly sold poison, the BBC reported in October. Although the research is not yet complete, the study concluded that all rats in those areas could become resistant to poisons within 10 years.  MSN