Rats have not abandoned us throughout history causing contagious infectious diseases, one of the most serious being known as the black or bubonic plague that broke out during the years 1347 to 1350 causing a pandemic that devastated the lives of half of Europe. whose transmission occurred through ships that transported people and goods with infected fleas that carried the bacillus that lived in rodents.
In the Canary Islands there was an outbreak in 1506 causing thousands of deaths that began in Gran Canaria,Fuerteventura and Lanzarote to go to Tenerife where it lasted two years, being a real social, health, economic and demographic disaster with a terrifying death toll of between 5,000 and 7,000 on an island of barely 20,000 inhabitants.
And at present, although not with the virulence of previous times given that the sanitary conditions are different and very favourable, it must be taken into account that rats continue to act in the field of human health as transmitters of certain diseases through from its bite and urine such as Sodoku, leptospirosis (Weil’s disease) that produces about 500,000 human cases and about 1000 deaths a year; lymphocytic choriomeningitis, the plague, already mentioned, and typhus.
All this previous comment is relevant given that the rat is taken into account in the Animal Protection and Welfare Law that was recently approved in the Congress of Deputies, which has generated certain doubts and, at the same time, concern. And it is that an important change has been introduced in the Penal Code by deleting article 337 and the protection of the legal right contemplated in article 440 has been increased by changing the name “domestic animal” to “vertebrate animal”. And as a vertebrate animal is anyone who has bones, a skull, and an articulated skeleton or spine, by virtue of the new law, hitting a vertebrate animal injuring or killing it will be punishable by imprisonment; and here the controversy appears since the rat is a vertebrate animal and in case of not ending its life but injuring it with blows, penalties are established that range between 3 and 12 months if it is denounced or a fine of 1 to 2 months, or with I work for the benefit of the community between 1 and 30 days. And if you kill her at home you will receive a fine of 50,000 euros and up to 18 months in prison.
With all this, the application of the new law approved may enter, when it is published in the BOE, in the field of controversy, and its execution will be given according to the interpretation made by one or other certain judges.
And with regard to deratization, some not very clarifying spaces appear again when mentioning that local entities will put non-lethal population control of urban fauna before their action plans in terms of animal protection, guaranteeing the rights of animals.
Given this and given the proliferation of rats that when they become pregnant, their gestation period lasts from 20 to 22 days and they have between 6 and 8 litters a year and each litter consists of 6 to 8 pups, we can find a number huge number of rats that grow exponentially and, as we have said, are capable of causing damage not only to the economy but also to humans as they are transmitters of diseases, so it can be argued that in order to eradicate them in the event of pests, it would be necessary to use methods not lethal, that drives them away and they go to another place from which they will continue causing possible damage to people’s health.
But when they move to another place, they will continue to increase the colony of rats existing there, which is why they would enter into an “ad infinitum continuum” where the deratization campaigns, the municipalities before pests, can find themselves unarmed to achieve total eradication and they will have to have the rats in a situation of perennial captivity and segregate the male and the female so that their multiplication is totally difficult, but that by keeping them in captivity they are being mistreated, which is penalized.
Issues that the laws address with the aim of improving the lives of animals, which seems good to us, but we will have to be careful. What should be prioritized that could compromise the health of people or a community.
So let’s think about it so that the law, until it comes to an end, includes somewhat confusing situations because it gives the feeling that they have forgotten the history of medicine and certain infectious diseases that have not been completely eradicated where rats are their main transmission vector.
