‘Rats everywhere’: numbers caught are up 323%. So why are authorities not worried?

Hygiene department says rising numbers over past decade show trapping works, but experts caution residents’ daily lives may give opposite impression

Hong Kong resident Yau Suk-ming was startled in her kitchen when her daughter turned on a countertop blender and a rat leapt out into the open.

The rodent scurried away before the 74-year-old retiree could catch it, but she was not surprised as she had earlier noticed rat droppings in her flat on Kowloon City’s Bulkeley Street.

“Turns out rats are afraid of ‘earthquakes’ – but I was not afraid, I am very proud of that,” she joked, saying she could not do much but put up with them.

Yau may be sanguine about her pest problem, but the rats lurking in the underbelly of the city’s wet markets, butcher shops and fresh produce stores have increasingly become a cause for wider concern about public health and hygiene.

The number of live or dead rodents caught and collected every year has risen by 323 per cent in the past decade, but authorities said their containment strategy, assisted by AI, was working.

That message, however, could contradict what residents saw in their daily lives, experts said.