Earlier rats were spotted roaming freely, here and there, on the streets of Washington, and rushing across the trash bins in every corner of the streets in search of food. But this time, they were spotted wandering on the lawns of the White House, the official residence of the President of United States, Donald Trump.
Washington Post cited Fox News' chief White House correspondent John Roberts who first reported on Monday (December 17) that rats are everywhere in the District of Columbia (D.C.), including the White House.
"So - I am standing in our @FoxNews standup location on the @WhiteHouse North Lawn and notice in my peripheral vision something moving at my left foot. I assumed it was one of the ubiquitous WH squirrels. But no....it was a big brown rat," the chief White House correspondent of Fox News tweeted on Monday.
This is the second time that a rat incident has become famous after a rat was spotted gorging on a pizza slice on the busy New York streets in 2015, and came to known as the 'Pizza Rat'.
The presence of rats in the White House lawn also triggered numerous reactions from netizens, as they kept on wondering if the rat went there in search of some job or was it 'fleeing a sinking ship?'
Washington Post cited a program manager at D.C. Department of Health, also District's resident rat guru, Gerard Brown, as saying that the rats must have come out of their burrows due to heavy rain or the increasing population in the metropolitan city.
"Water doesn't kill them or reduce them at all - rats can swim for as long as a week - but what it does do is make it difficult for them to find food," Brown said.
"That draws them out, too," he added.
The District of Columbia allocated an additional fund of USD 906,000 to the Department of Health in order to resolve the rat problem in the city.
According to a city data, Petworth, Columbia Heights and Capitol Hill are a few among the other cities heavily infected by rats.
"Every human in D.C. comes within five feet of a rat every single day," Brown said.
"They just may not always know it," he noted.
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