15 Terrifying Animals That Are Way Smaller Than You

This  disease-carrying rat species has been a scourge upon humanity since it brought the Black Plague that wiped out large swaths of the European population in the 14th century.

Not only can these rats live off of anything from human garbage to rotting carcasses, but what also makes them so vilified is that they can chew through anything. It has been said that brown rats can chew through plastic, iron and cement, making them excellent burrowers, and the bane of house builders everywhere.

That is why, for example in ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’, the antagonists use a rat in a heated bucket to torture an informant; because with time, that rat would’ve eaten its way through the man’s body.

Of course, the other thing that makes the Brown Rat so terrifying is its sheer numbers; it's the second-most successful species on earth besides humans to spread its population around the globe. These rats can live pretty much anywhere and live off of anything, which makes an ideal situation to reproduce. That's why there are so many of them in big cities, and not even the most sophisticated of extermination programs can get rid of them.

More than anything, it's the never-ending growth of the rat population that terrifies us most, and the prospect that, for each rat killed, ten more take its place.