If the rats that everyone hates are really extinct, will it necessarily be a good thing for mankind?

I don't know when the proverb "When a rat crosses the street, everyone shouts and beats it" originated, but it seems that ever since the existence of human beings, humans have had no good feelings towards rats.

Why are rats so disgusting? There are probably three reasons. First, most rats do not look lovable, and people feel disgusted at first sight. Second, rats are omnivorous animals with strong reproductive capacity. Rats can be found everywhere, from fields to barns and homes. These rats will rob human food, which is a very serious matter in the period when productivity was not well developed. Over time, human beings' hatred for rats has been deeply planted in their hearts. Third, rats are mobile germ storage sites. There may be various bacteria and viruses on rats, and these viruses are likely to be transmitted to humans, causing serious infectious diseases, the most representative of which is plague.

There have been three plague pandemics in human history, in the 6th century AD, the 14th century AD, and the mid-19th century AD.

The most famous of these was the second plague pandemic that began in 1346. In the first seven years after the outbreak, 25 million people died across Europe, and it is impossible to count how many people died from the plague in the end. Objectively, the ravages of the plague also caused overall social changes. The uncontrollable plague led to the loss of authority of the church, which induced the Renaissance. The ideological liberation brought about by the Renaissance laid the foundation for the subsequent Industrial Revolution. In addition, the population drop caused by the plague led to an increase in labor costs, so business owners were more willing to use machines instead of manpower, which indirectly promoted the Industrial Revolution.

The plague bacteria live in rats and are transmitted to humans through fleas. The plague that humans suffer from at this time is called "bubonic plague."

Bubonic plague is not very scary. Although its mortality rate is as high as 50%, it cannot be transmitted from person to person. If the plague virus is not controlled and invades the lungs, it will develop into "pneumonic plague", which can then be transmitted from person to person, and the mortality rate of pneumonic plague is significantly increased. In the absence of effective treatment, the mortality rate is close to 100%. If the plague bacteria invade the blood, it will develop into "septicemic plague", which is impossible to treat. Because black circles appear all over the body of the deceased, it is also called "Black Death". The plague is so terrible that it makes people hate rats even more.

From a human perspective, the saying “When a rat crosses the street, everyone shouts and beats it” is definitely not unfair to rats, but if rats really become extinct, it would not be a good thing either.

Have you ever thought about this question: why have rats not become extinct even though they have been hunted down and blocked by humans for thousands of years? Because the number of rats is huge, and the reason why the number of rats is huge is that rats have a strong reproductive capacity. No animal exists independently in an ecosystem, and its existence is closely related to the stable balance of the entire ecosystem. Of course, in an ecosystem, the importance of different organisms is different, so which animal is the most important? It is often not the animals at the top of the food chain, but the organisms at the bottom of the food chain.

For example, a tiger eats more than 100 sheep a year, and these sheep eat more than 100,000 kilograms of grass every year. In this food chain, grass is the most important.

If there is no grass, the sheep will have no food, and if there is no sheep, the tiger will have nothing to eat. Similarly, the number of mice is extremely large. In nature, there are a large number of animals that feed on mice. If mice become extinct, a large number of animals that feed on mice will face the risk of extinction. In addition, the number of other competitors in the same ecological niche as mice may increase sharply, which will bring about new ecosystem fluctuations and may even lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem. This is not alarmist. The stable balance of the ecosystem is very delicate. It seems unbreakable, but it is very fragile.

Having said that, although mice are annoying, don’t they have some advantages? In fact, they do have some advantages.

First of all, mice and humans have a very high genetic similarity, about 85% or more, and mice have strong reproductive capacity and a short cultivation cycle, which makes mice very suitable for scientific experiments. Many of today's life science achievements have been contributed by mice, and it can even be said that mice play an irreplaceable role in scientific experiments. In addition, in nature, mice can also help some plants sow seeds, which is not useless. Therefore, every creature on the earth has its own unique way of survival, but each creature does not exist independently. They are all an indispensable part of the existing ecosystem, keeping the ecosystem stable and balanced.

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