Rat

Rat
Biological type:	Rodent
Place of origin:	Earth
Notable individuals:	Rose, Ron Rat
First mentioned in:	The Reign of Terror
First appearance:	Challenge of the Piper
Appearances:	see list

Extraterrestrial lookalikes

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 Ron 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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 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)

Shockeye of the Quawncing Grig, contemplating the taste of rat flesh. (TV: The Two Doctors)

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)

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)

The brother of Gwen Cooper's friend Janice had a pet rat named Fang. (AUDIO: Love Rat)

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)

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)

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)

Rats inhabited the alleyways of the colony planet Vourakis 3. (COMIC: Pirates of Vourakis)

By the 30th century, all wild animals and plants were extinct except for humans and rats. (PROSE: Just War)

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)

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)

Sentient rats in 1983. (AUDIO: Rat Trap)

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)