Invasion of the Super Rats...er, or not

Great headline on the Lincolnshire Echo's story tonight about a new generation of 'super rats' apparently invading the city of Lincoln, fattened on a high-protein diet of dumped fast-food kebabs and burgers.

As the Echo says, it sounds like the stuff of nightmares - giant rodents invading our homes on the hunt for food.

A silly season story?

Definitely.

The most convincing (not) horror story of rats the Echo could muster was retired civil servant June Belton who says she still gets goosebumps after what the paper hypes as as "a late-night close encounter with a rat on Monks Road".

Apparently, the rat looked at Ms Belton before scuttling away. "It was horrible," she said.

Spine-tingling, I'm sure.

But I wonder who was more frightened by close encounter: Ms Belton or the rat...

What evidence was there that it was a so-called "super-rat" and do they even exist?

You have to trawl through 19 Echo paragraphs of rat horror story, nightmare anecdote, and descripton of an cinema advert of a couple in bed with rats crawling over them before you get to this gem:
.

Meanwhile, professional rat catchers in the city have dismissed the 'super rat' claims as rubbish
Ian Spraggins, of Eradicate Pest Control Specialists, said: "Every year you get stories of super rats and there is no such thing.

So, there we are then.
Not really a story at all.

But never mind. The prize-winning headline which almost justifies the story: "Town Rats Boom"