I lived above a sandwich shop in Toronto during the garbage strike. There were huge piles of trash behind the building, and the employees would go out there and beat the rats with broom sticks. There were a lot of them, and they were huge. At the restaurant I worked in, a night manager trapped a monster rat in a trash bin and left it there. I found it in the morning when I went to pick up the stuff curiously stacked on top of the bin and it nearly jumped out and bit me. Quite the scare. Drowned the thing, wasn't happy about starting my day that way...