Rat

Rats were small rodents (PROSE: The Plotters) found on Earth and other planets. They were generally considered pests by humans. Polly was virtually incapacitated by her fear of rats in a 17th century jail, (TV: The Smugglers) and the Eleventh Doctor once claimed to hate rats, (TV: The Wedding of River Song) with his sixth incarnation attempting to murder Reggie Rat for simply insulting Doctor Who. (TV: Untitled) Rats were often associated with cheese. (TV: The Bells of Saint John) In the Doctor's TARDIS, Erimem fed Antranak dead rats from the food machine. (AUDIO: Nekromanteia)
The collective term for rats was a "mischief". (PROSE: Avatars of the Intelligence)
== Earth rats ==
=== 13th century ===
According to folklore, the Pied Piper rid the German town of Hamelin of its rats in exchange for twenty bags of gold in 1284. (COMIC: Challenge of the Piper, TV: The Day of the Clown)
=== 14th century ===
In the 14th century, fleas on rats carried the bubonic plague throughout Europe. Terileptil prisoners who found themselves near London in 1666 exploited this to engineer a new plague variant that was injected into the rats. This plague was prevented by the Fifth Doctor. (TV: The Visitation)
=== 17th century ===
Upon arriving in 1601, Susan Foreman was disgusted by a "gigantic" rat, even as her grandfather assured that it was likely more scared of her than she of it. (AUDIO: The Hollow Crown)
In 1605, the drains near the Houses of Parliament in London were infested with rats. The plotter Thomas Percy was disgusted by them. (GAME: The Gunpowder Plot)
=== 18th century ===
In Paris in July 1794, Susan was frightened by the rats she saw in the jail cell in which she and Barbara Wright were imprisoned. (TV: The Reign of Terror)
=== 20th century ===
While escaping The Squall in 1910, Amy Pond and Rory Williams entered the London sewers. The sewers were infested with rats, to Amy's horror. (PROSE: Paradox Lost)
During the First World War, soldiers such as Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart were "used to rats". (TV: Twice Upon a Time) Some rats were modified by the Daleks as part of the Dalek Project. A cyborg rat saw Corporal Edward Anderson running through a trench. The rat followed him and was killed. Another rat observed the Eleventh Doctor and his companions running through the trench before going to Hellcombe Factory. After the Daleks were defeated, a surviving modified rat saw the Doctor and Angela Todd drinking tea. In 2017, a rat crawled on a nearly damaged Dalek as its eyestalk glowed blue, indicating that the Dalek was still alive. (COMIC: The Dalek Project)
During the Spanish Civil War, the trenches were often infested with rats. George Orwell found them the most distressing factor of trench warfare. (PROSE: History 101)
In an account dated to January 1965, while Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward was being held captive by Carl, with a bomb ready to be placed with a detonation time of 90 minutes, Jeff Tracy attempted to use the Emergency Code Machine to send a message using "Contact Code 5" that only she could translate, as to others, it was simply a "tapping noise". After this was noticed by Carl, he questioned the noise, as well as its sudden disappearance. Lady Penelope told him that it "must have been rats", as "these places [did] have them", going on to claim that he "must have some rats". After Carl asked if she was "trying to be funny", she went on to claim that she was simply trying to explain the noise and, as Jeff had visual and audio contact with her via her communicator disguised as a makeup mirror, she was able to tell him Carl's plans without Carl noticing, by asking if the rats would leave the boat before the explosion, or if they'd "go up with it" as well. (TV: The Man from MI.5)
Other sources dated the activities of International Rescue to the 1990s, (PROSE: The Dying Days) the 2060s, (PROSE: Titan Declares War! et al.) and the 2080s. (PROSE: Captain Scarlet in Death Crash! et al.) In at least one of these timeframes, the year 2066, Tin-Tin was shown to be alive and well. (COMIC: Solar Danger)In the 1970s, Arthur Linwood, a medical student with a morbid fear of rats, was killed at Stangmoor Prison when the Keller Machine turned his fear against him. His fear was so great that rat bites and scratches manifested on his face and neck. (TV: The Mind of Evil)
In the cellar of a Spanish hacienda in the 1980s, Shockeye of the Quawncing Grig caught a rat, broke its neck and began to devour it raw. He was displeased with the taste, hypothesising it might be more tolerable smoke-dried. (TV: The Two Doctors)
=== 21st century ===
In 2007, undercover Krillitane at Deffry Vale High School freeze-dried rats to eat later. Mickey Smith let out a scream when accidentally discovering this supply. (TV: School Reunion)
In the 21st century, Rat Monthly was a periodical dedicated to rats. One issue of it contained the articles "LOVE RATS", "NOW RAT'S WHAT I CALL MUSIC", and "UNSATURATED RAT". The cover of said issue featured a white rat and a grey rat. (WC: Home Assistant)
The brother of Gwen Cooper's friend Janice had a pet rat named Fang. (AUDIO: Love Rat)
In 2023, Shawna Thompson noted London was "a very ratty city". At this time, Cleo Proctor was investigating sightings of mutant rats in Docklands. (AUDIO: )
The Fifth Doctor found some rats in Striker's Edwardian yacht. (TV: Enlightenment)
In 2050, the Space-Time Manipulator released a couple of black rats in Gryffen Manor, frightening Darius Pike. While these rats were otherwise identical to normal rats, they multiplied once every ten seconds. (TV: Liberation)
=== 22nd century ===
Paradise Towers had a rat population after it fell into ruin. (TV: Paradise Towers)
Following the 22nd century Dalek invasion, the rat population in England surged, likely because basic services had been discontinued. Prices for cats went through the roof. (PROSE: Legacy of the Daleks)
=== 23rd century ===
During the Dalek invasion of Earth in the year 2254, Large Rats were found in the London Underground, where they menaced the Seventh Doctor and Ace. (GAME: Dalek Attack)
=== 26th-30th century ===
Rats inhabited the alleyways of the colony planet Vourakis 3. (COMIC: Pirates of Vourakis)
=== 30th century ===
By the 30th century, all wild animals and plants were extinct except for humans and rats. (PROSE: Just War)
=== 41st century ===
Rats were a common sight in the filthy Earth colony on Lebenswelt. One rat tried to bite Anji Kapoor's nose. (PROSE: The Book of the Still)
=== 52nd century ===
At some point in the 52nd century, rats would sneak into the Seventh Transept where they were eaten by the skulls of the headless monks. (TV: The Wedding of River Song)
=== In experiments ===
Rats were used in experiments as test subjects, since they could be bred quickly. In the late 19th century, Magnus Greel created giant rats and set them loose in the London sewers to guard his underground laboratory. (TV: The Talons of Weng-Chiang) According to Sarah Jane Smith, dead rats were used as a teaching tool in schools, although this practice had been discontinued by Rose Tyler's time. (TV: School Reunion)
A group of rats with interlinked tails was known as Rat King. On 9 June 1983, the Fifth Doctor encountered a Rat King in the Cadogan Tunnels. It was the leader of a group of sentient rats which had been experimented on by humans but had now taken control of them. The Rat King was killed by its creator, Dr Christopher Wallace, by its own punishment fluid. (AUDIO: Rat Trap)
Richard Harries used a pair of sibling rats in his experiments into shared brainwaves. The actions one rat learnt could be performed by the other. The pair had a collective memory. Cuthbert Simpson implanted them with nano-cams and set them free, using them to watch the residents of Banquo Manor. After Simpson was blinded, he relied on the rats to allow him to see and kept them on his person. (PROSE: The Banquo Legacy)
A lab rat was used by Owen Harper to demonstrate to the Torchwood Three team the ultimately lethal effects of the "Sex Gas" on its host. The gas would cause the victim to explode, which proved to be no different with the rat. (TV: Day One)
=== On other planets ===
Rats existed on Skaro until the latter stages of the Thousand Year War. (AUDIO: Davros, Corruption)
On the planet Gyros, the Gyros destroyed rats which tried to eat the food the robots had harvested and stored. (COMIC: The Gyros Injustice)
The Steggosians were wiped out by a plague they had caught from rats. (PROSE: The Eyeless)
== References ==
Putting on the Tenth Doctor's jacket, Donna Noble complained that he was so skinny it "wouldn't fit a rat." (TV: The Runaway Bride)
While using a newsreader as a mouthpiece, Rosemary Kizlet remarked that her human prey homed in on Wi-Fi like rats sniffing cheese. (TV: The Bells of Saint John)
Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart mistook the Dalek mutants on Villengard for rats. As a First World War combatant, Archibald noted that he was "used to rats". (TV: Twice Upon a Time)
 
Category:Earth rodents
Category:Domesticated animals
Category:Species from the real world
Category:Fears
Category:Skaro creatures
Category:Sapient mammal species