10000 rats is a couple roomfuls, not a sea hundreds of yards wide. Unless your rodents are of unusual size, you can fit 6-10 in one square foot, and a big rat weighs half a pound. And they can’t jump at your face like the Willard movie.
At 10" long and 3"-4" wide (not counting tails), you could get four rats per square foot (approx 0.25sf per rat). That’s a large black rat. That gives you 2,500 sq feet of rat if they’re all in even layered sheet. 2,500sq foot home for reference.
Trying to get them hundreds of yards wide would give you a very shallow band of rats, all shoulder to shoulder.
I would go slug-buck-bird and say #5s -------- rinse and repeat. After all there are those pesky rats to consider.
(I wasn’t part of Team Rat)
Why not give the ‘hunter’ a minigun? That would sure work! I don’t know of any hunter with a shotgun such as what you guys are talking about. The military has some large capacity shotguns with drum magazines (as far as I know the CAW was never put into production and only a few prototypes were made) but most are just modified 12 gauge shotguns with maybe a bit higher capacity (no large magazines). They have some automatic shotguns but I don’t know of maybe that are in regular use (afaik even special forces use things like Benelli M1014 the Mossberg 500 series or Winchester M97). If you’ve seen John Wick 2 that’s the sort of shotgun the military usually uses.
And a hunter would be using a hunting shotgun. Even if you handed him something like an automatic shotgun I doubt he could use it effectively unless he was trained on it, as he’d be more familiar with the weapons he hunts with and how they operate.
Because the rules say shotgun, DUH!
No, I know it’s ridiculous. I’m stretching the hypothetical as far as I can while technically staying within its limits, figuring that as the victim and the person who didn’t write the rules, I get to interpret them as liberally as I want.
I could go further, and point out that the rules never specify the health of any of the animals, but where would be the fun in that?
I admit that I don’t want to be attacked by 10,000 dead rats either.
10,000 plague-stricken rats probably won’t help your odds.
[Nerd]Although 10,000 10k/10k rats would be an easy win[/Nerd]
That and I’m actually not sure just how a minigun would do against the rats. If it was soft ground and I wasn’t getting a lot of fragmentation and ricochets ------- those rats could be pesky. And are the rats going to attack as a swarm (zombie-style since we’re talking about health 
) or more in groups? And what about the other attackers - same kinda question. We don’t know for sure going in so I still thinking shotgun and gorillas.
Sure, but presumably the rats wouldn’t be packing themselves together that closely while attacking you, but would be spread out over a much wider area, making it that much harder to shoot them as they approached.
If several lions are attacking you, they wouldn’t be marching shoulder-to-shoulder as they came at you, either.