Can i eat rats

China is a big consumer of rat meat. It is commonly sold raw in Chinese meat markets, and can also be purchased cooked from various shops and street vendors. Some of the markets in China also offer live rats for sale. Bats are common, as are snakes, but interested buyers can find almost any kind of meat they want if they go to the right place.

Exotic markets carry many kinds of meats you would never find at a shop in the United States. Rat is prepared in various ways in China. This is partly a matter of personal taste and partly a matter of how many people it must feed. Grilled or barbecued rat is common and is a favorite with many. The rat will be gutted and skinned and then cooked over an open fire, usually with some type of sauce or seasonings applied. Cooked rat is frequently spitted on a long bamboo spear and sold by street vendors for people to eat as they walk.

Some people in China prefer to eat baby rat meat, and they will even eat them alive after dipping them into a sauce to add a favorite flavor. While this practice is not common throughout the Chinese population, it is done by some. Often restaurants specialize in this dish, as they will have rat pups on hand for just this purpose.

This is not advised as the risks of raw meat consumption, especially in rats, could be teeming with bacterial and viral threats. Another way that the Chinese eat these animals is by cooking them in a stew. There they may be added to other types of meat and vegetables. Everything is cooked until it is tender and then eaten along with the gravy created by cooking. In some places, they are trapped and then kept caged until they are sold, but it is also quite common to see people selling cooked rats by the side of a main road that is outside the city limits.

Not surprisingly, many roadside stands that sell cooked rat meat are set alongside large rice fields, so it is easy to replenish the supply when the pile of critters runs low. People frequently buy several of these rodents to take home to eat, often as the main dish in a family meal. They are also sold by street vendors, as in China, as cooked rat skewered on a stick so that it can be carried and eaten easily. The rat is the centerpiece of a festival menu in one part of northern India, where the Adi tribe celebrates a holiday each year by feasting on a special rat stew.

Found in the southern Himilayas, this stew is something that the people there love but that people in other parts of the world might struggle to consume. It contains many rat parts boiled in a big pot and includes the liver, stomach, testes, intestines, fetuses, legs, and tails. And what did it taste like? In the Indian state of Bihar, Gates spent some time with the Dalits, one of the poorest castes in India.

According to Gates, these small rats were very tender and tasted much like a small chicken or quail. The only unpleasant aspect was the smell of burning hair — to avoid wasting any bit of skin or meat from the tiny animal it is grilled whole, to burn off its hair. But it was all good inside. Our taste for rodents goes back many centuries. Until about years ago the kiore — or Rattus exulans , a close relative of the common house rat — was eaten by many Polynesians, including the Maori of New Zealand.

A food vendor sells freshly barbecued field rats alongside a highway just north of Bangkok, Thailand Credit: Grant Singleton. According to the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, the kiore was considered a delicacy served to visitors and even used as a currency, exchanged at ceremonies such as weddings. Singleton says he has eaten rat meat at least six times in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam.

As for the flavour? Singleton also recalls eating rats in the uplands of Laos and in the lower delta of Myanmar. When cooked, rat looks more like rabbit, Ginn thinks, just because of the shape of the cuts. According to Ginn, rats are most commonly eaten in Asia because of the rice crop. In areas where rats feed off rice paddies rather than garbage, the rodents are considered safer to eat.

The New York Times reports that the arrest announcement "did not explain how exactly the traders acquired the rats and other creatures. Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Now Baku wants to turn the fabled fortress town into a resort. By Elizabeth F. May 3, , PM. Tags: Agriculture , China , East Asia. Read More. November 12, , AM. Most of the diseases contracted from rats will come from bites, handling them, or coming in contact with their excrements.

Rats and other rodents can carry fleas, mites, ticks, and lice, which are all parasitic insects that can carry disease. In fact, the spreading of parasites is how they helped spread diseases like the black plague so drastically in China and Europe during the s. The black plague, or black death, was responsible for wiping out one-third of the European population then and still is around today. It is rare, but this disease can still be transferred to humans by parasites who have first fed on infected rats.

If you are still interested in how rat meat tastes after going over all the risks of dealing with them, you should know that many people actually love the stuff. Rat meat has its own distinct taste that people describe as gamey but not gross. Rat is often described as tasting really similar to squirrel, rabbit, and even chicken. If you don't believe it, a simple search on YouTube will prove that many people regularly eat and enjoy rat meat. However, as mentioned before, the most commonly eaten rats are those that eat primarily field crops like rice.

Eating rats is not too out of the ordinary for people in many countries; in fact, people have been eating them for centuries. Rat is still eaten all around the world but seems to be most popular in Asian countries. It is believed rats have been eaten in China as far back as at least AD. While they still eat a variety of wild animals, China has recently banned the breeding and consumption of certain rats like the bamboo rat since the coronavirus outbreak.