Cuz look what they’re reading in their newspapers these days:
Scientists warn of new ‘super rats’
Genetic mutations are resulting in resistance to poisons and rising city infestationsA new type of “super rat” with genetic mutations that apparently makes it resistant to commonly used poisons is infesting towns and cities across Britain, a scientist warned today.
Pest experts in parts of Britain have noticed an increase in the number of rats who appear to be immune to poisons. Some had believed the resistance was caused by mother rats feeding the poison to their young and inadvertently increasing their immunity.
But researchers from the University of Huddersfield believe a genetic mutation has resulted in the rodents’ resistance. Professor Robert Smith, one of the UK’s leading experts on rats, said the mutation had been found in rats in parts of Hampshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Swindon and Bristol.
Resistant rats had also been found in East Yorkshire – possibly a result of a different mutation to the ones in the south of England.
…
Smith said people were turning to other means of controlling rats. He said: “I have been contacted by exterminators who really know what they are doing that have to use guns and traps. But that is not good enough if rat levels get to infestation proportions and you are trying to get the problem under control.”
I see Pegg as the exterminator…
Artist’s rendering of the beast:
i think it would be briliant if pegg and wright did a movie based on the allusions in Sherlock Holmes stories to the Giant Rat of Sumatra (which Watson could not write of there due to the fact that governments would fall, or something)… i bet they could do a great jungle/detective/streets of london thing…
What color Cornetto wuld appear in that film?
More likely the rats have grown resistant to the poisons that have been used by ingesting just a little bit of them over long periods of time. Just like some bacteria have become resistant to the drugs we use to combat them.
Apparently, James Herbert was psychic.
@bronxbee,
Alan Vanneman has already written the Giant Rat of Sumatra (http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Giant-Rat-Sumatra/dp/0786709561).
I have yet to find a convincing imitator of Conan Doyle.
misterb: doesn’t mean pegg/wright couldn’t do something with it… how many versions of the Hound of the Baskervilles have been done? (at least 20, including ones in German, Polish, Russian).
bronxbee: Absolutely – while I’m a big fan of the Jermey Brett version, I’m looking forward to the new iconoclastic movie. I meant that Conan Doyle hasn’t been approached in *books*. I even liked the Gene Wilder/Marty Feldman Holmes comedy -> certainly that could be updated from the 70’s by Pegg/Wright.
As far as I’m concerned, we should have a Sherlock Holmes channel on our cable box.