A pest controller has said Britain’s record rainfall has driven rats indoors, with one caught on camera emerging from behind a radiator in a Wakefield home
Britain’s wet winter has forced rats to seek refuge indoors, according to one expert. Grim footage has emerged of a pest controller capturing a rodent crawling out from behind a domestic radiator and fleeing into a living room.
The unprecedented rain pour has sent the creatures scrambling for dry shelter, pest control specialist Kieran Sampler revealed. The vermin handler is now receiving up to 10 emergency calls a week to tackle the disease-spreading pests. The footage of the nasty scramble was taken at one of his most recent jobs in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Footage captured Kieran’s dog pouncing on the rat after he discovered it lurking behind the wall-mounted heating unit.
He explained: “It was an emergency call-out after reports of a rat running around a client’s living room. I quickly found it hiding behind a radiator after it had bolted from underneath the sofa.
The pest control specialist added: “It took some patience but I managed to prod it out. It made a run for it straight into one of our working Lakeland terriers, where it was dispatched within seconds.
“The property itself was very clean and well kept.” Kieran added: “It’s not necessarily because of defects in the house. It’s just the rain. It’s been so wet recently and we’ve had so many rainy days the rats are being driven indoors.
“I’m getting lots of call outs at the moment. And many of them are to perfectly lovely houses that are in very good areas and in very good condition.”
Winter proved the dampest on record for swathes of the UK, Met Office data confirmed. Across Britain, rainfall exceeded the long-term average by 13%. The Daily Star previously reported Rat activity is on the rise in Britain, according to the latest statistics.
Pest controllers say there was a 31% jump in sightings of the rodents in the last three months of 2024 compared to July to September. Mouse activity also rose by 32%, according to bosses at Rentokil.
The increase in activity is normal during the colder months, when the pests move indoors or closer to buildings searching for food, warmth and shelter. But the rise comes amid warnings that the number of rats globally is soaring.
In a recent study, 11 of the 16 cities looked at, including New York and Washington DC, showed “significant increasing trends in rat numbers”. Experts say this is because as global temperatures warm, rats can breed and forage for more of the year.
Jonathan Richardson, of the University of Richmond in Virginia, who is the lead author of the study, said: “There’d be no reason to expect it to be different in other places, adding “pretty much every city announces that they have a war on rats”.
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