It’s a phrase I’ve come across a number of times (“The tenament has rat the size of cats living in the basement!”), but is it possible? Is there a reliably documented instance of a Rattus rattus or Rattus norvegicus that really is the size of a cat?
(And so help me, anyone who says “I don’t believe they exist” will be smacked with a poodle).
With the tail extendedthis one would be pretty large.
I suppose they are the size of a small cat, or a big squirrel; the one in the video is. Last year in NYC, I recall seeing about a dozen running around Battery Park near the park entrance at night, chewing on discarded fast food in the wire garbage bins. Plus I saw one in the subway rails like the second video. They are almost as big as squirrels. If you think rats don’t get bigger than large mice - you are wrong.
They exist and I have seen them in my farm( rural india). They fed on tapioca mostly.
It;s a common phrase in NYC. It refers to the smaller variety of rats which are no bigger than a house cat, as in: “Those rats are cute! They’re only as big as a cat”. Those are probably just juveniles though. The average NYC rat is so large that they’ve rid the sewers of the albino alligators.
Neither Rattus rattus nor Rattus norvegicus, but rats anyway (sort of) sniffing out land mines.
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Nope. The smallest cat on record was ~3 lbs and that is a very, very small cat. The very largest Norway rats will top the scale at not much above 2 lbs and that is a very, very large rat.
So cats and rats do not overlap in size even at their respective extremes and your average cat is going to be much larger than your average rat. Now a capybara on the other hand…
I’m sure we could breed rats as big as cats and cats as small as rats if we put our minds to it. That is, based on how we have bred other domestic animals.
According to the prophecy, there will be, after the Glitter Apocalypse:
It’s possible that you had rodents of this size, but as Tamerlane says if they were as big as cats they were not Rattus norvegicus or Rattus rattus. However, I am not aware of any species in India that would qualify.
I’ve seen a lot of regular size rats over the years, but I did see one in 1981 or 1982 that was at least the size of a cat.
There were pics going around this summer of a maintenance worker in Brooklyn that impaled a gigantic rat. The one I saw was that big.
I’ve read about those! Aren’t they awesome?
What do they do? Just point out the location of the land mine, or obligingly explode the mines and themselves in the process?
They sniff them out and indicate them. They have very acute senses of smell and are trainable. Unlike dogs, they also have the advantage that even “giant” rats are too small to trip the mine, and they don’t bond to particular handlers - they’ll work with anyone who has food.
We live near a wooded area & people are always mistaking possums for rats. Like, “I saw an enormous rat on the way here”. So maybe there’s some of that in that saying.
I’m not saying you’re wrong and I’m definitely not trying to ‘one up’ NYC, (This is Texas, mind you. ;)) but I’ve personally had a rat come out from underneath my truck and run across my foot in downtown Houston. :eek:
IIRC, it wasn’t as big as an average sized house cat, but it sure as Hell wasn’t ***a whole lot smaller ***than one, either.
I live just 4 miles north of downtown (inside the Loop, for those that know) and in the last couple of years alone, IIRC my Dad and I have caught at least 5 possums and two racoons, and all of them were fully grown.
I’m talking ‘inner city’ here, not the ‘burbs’. :eek:
I will concede that a possum does slightly resemble a rat, but not enough to mistake one for the other, IMHO.
We had a grossly fat pet rat who weighed in at a little over 3#. But I want to point out, he could hardly walk, he was so fat (but he was very happy, anyway).
Impressions of size are notoriously unreliable. Without an actual specimen in hand and accurate measurements, anecdotal observations like this don’t provide any real support for the existence of rats the size of cats.
That story actually involved an African Giant Pouched Rat (or Gambian Pouched Rat). Although these are very large, they are only the size of a very small cat. Note that in the photo the rat on the pitchfork is being held much closer to the camera than the person holding it, making it look much larger than it actually is.
As has been said, there are some big rodents around, but they are different from the common domestic rats.