South Carolina rats are deadly pests that most people around the globe have to deal with. They damage everything in their path, and also act as carriers of various diseases and plagues. They have incredible jaws and teeth which see them chew through most materials that people have in their houses, resulting in property damages and incurs costs for the home owners.



They have powerful jaws because their incisors don’t stop growing, and if left to grow unchecked, it would kill the rat because it would be unable to close its mouth or eat. So, to check the growth of their incisors, rats have to constantly chew through and bite on solid materials.

In this article, we will look at the answer to the question - what can Charleston rats chew through?

Charleston rats will chew on anything that is not as hard as their teeth. The scale for hardness of materials - the Mohs scale, measures the hardness of a particular material against its ability to degrade another material. The scale ranges from 1 which is for soft materials such as Talcum, to 10 for the hardest materials on the planet like diamonds.

On this scale, the hardness of a rat’s teeth is ranked at 5.5 which is actually more harder than iron or even copper. Human teeth is ranked at 5, which means that our enamel is not as hard as a rat’s teeth. And so for this reason, rats can chew through most materials with relative ease.

The materials that people use to block the path of rats, can be easily chewed through by those very same rats. They can chew through wood, plastic, bricks, lead, aluminium, cement, asbestos, cinder blocks, electrical cabling, clothes, leather, wool, PVC pipes to name a few materials. They can chew through soft metals like aluminium very easy, but they cannot chew through steel which is harder than the rat’s incisors - except, of course, if the steel is rusted, they can chew through it.

Like with all natural processes, time plays a key role in determining the chewing efficiency of the rat. If you place a small piece of metal and hire two rats to chew through that piece, giving them a long period of time to work through the metal, they are more than likely to succeed and chew through that metal. Now, if you have more rats working the same piece of metal, the time to chew through it would be significantly reduced - which calls for prevention measures to stop them from breeding, so that they can be eradicated easily. If one rat is working for a long time to chew through a material, it is more likely that it will be discovered by a predator or a human being and be terminated.

Again, the reason for their chewing is just survival. Filing their incisors is the most important priority for them, and they must keep at it constantly if they want to keep living on this planet for a longer while.

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