Steven Belmain

The role of rodents in our world is so tremendous, there'd be quite a lot of chaos if the jury's out, really.

Stephen, they're not here anymore.

Are we living the dream?

I think in the short term, in a city like London or in any city around the world, there'd be a lot of relief.

Their impact in some parts of the world is much more severe than what we routinely have to deal with here.

Rats are living in people's houses in Africa in much higher numbers all the time.

And their children have nightmares about rats because they're being bitten by rats while they're sleeping.

And they can hear them running around in their house.

So by getting rid of rats, we would make a lot of people's lives much better.

What about diseases?

Is it going to make a big difference?

The rat species can transmit lots of diseases.

There are some farmers exposed to leptospirosis called Vile syndrome locally.

But it's not a huge problem here in the UK.

In other parts of the world, it is a massive problem, particularly in the tropics.

and Norway rats are one of the main culprits for that.

We might see some diseases diminish, but remember, we're not getting rid of all rodents, and many of these diseases are harbored by other species of rodents.

Plague can be found in black rats and brown rats,

but in fact it probably came from gerbils, to be more precise.

So there's a lot of good evidence that rats became a transient reservoir, so they could transmit the disease in Europe, but actually they're not very good at being a reservoir, a plague.