It's expensive and risky, and it can be hard to find a specialist vet. I kept pet rats once, and it was easier to just separate the males and females from each other.
A landlord brought glue traps once upon complaints of a rat.
After the rat was caught, I had read about how they slowly suffocate over days, often chewing off their own limbs in a largely futile attempt to escape.
I ended up bludgeoning the rat. I still remember the high pitched scream it made upon receiving the first blow. It only lasted about a minute but it was a pretty fucked up experience, and that was going the merciful route.
"A female rat typically births six litters a year consisting of up to 12 rat pups, although 5-10 pups are more common. Rats reach sexual maturity after nine weeks, meaning that a population can swell from two rats to around 1,250 in one year, with the potential to grow exponentially."[1]
Unless you kill all of them at once and set up some sort of impossibly perfect rat detection system to kill the ones in every building and trash can, how is killing something like on the order of 10 female-year progeny even news? It's like putting a piece of masking tape over a water main break. You have to reduce their food, their ability to reproduce, etc.
Well, much like a service dog (or a horse!), you'd have to train the rat, and feed it, and change its cage. It would be less expensive to care for than those larger animals for sure, but still a hassle.
I had to do exactly these surgeries on rats for a few years as a lab tech.
Also did some other fun things such as mass killings of rats using mini-guillotines, harvesting bones and doing amateur brain surgeries while other rats watched restlessly and anxiously peeped from the smell of blood.
This kind of stuff can mess with your sanity. For me it was a converse of how serial killers injure animals when they were children.
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