This Is To Help You Sleep Tonight. . .

1. A rat can tread water for three days and survive being flushed down the toilet. (And it can return to the building via the same route.) There is approximately one rat per person in the United States.

2. In June 2006, animal rescue workers in Petaluma, Calif., found Roger Dier in his one-bedroom home overrun with more than 1,000 brown rats. The brood began after the obsessed collector took pity on a baby rat he planned to feed to his pet python.

3. Rats can squeeze through a hole as small as a quarter to get into your house.

4. Rats eat their own feces, purely for the nutritional value.

5. A female rat can mate as many as 500 times with various males during a six-hour period of receptivity -- a state she experiences about 15 times per year. Thus a pair of brown rats can produce as many as 2,000 descendants in a year if left to breed unchecked. (A rat matures sexually at age three to four months.) An average rat's life span is two to three years.

6. A rat can fall as far as 50 feet and land uninjured.

7. A recent study at the National Institutes of Health revealed that decreasing the caloric intake of rats expands their life span. So feed them as much as you can.

8. Rats are known to transmit several potentially fatal diseases to humans, including viral hemorrhagic fever, plague, Weil's disease and Q fever.

After reading all this, does anyone still like rats? Blech. I think I'd better go read something else before I go to sleep tonight.

(photo and information taken from THIS article.)