Berlin, Dec. 17: The sleepy town of Hamelin has a rat problem — again. The first time, according to legend, the rats ran riot.

“Rats!” wrote Robert Browning in his famous poem. “They fought the dogs and killed the cats, and bit the babies in the cradles, and ate the cheeses out of the vats, and licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles!”

That was supposedly in 1376 (the Brothers Grimm set the date as 1284 in their version), when a man in strange attire playing a pipe lured the rodents out of the houses and they danced and pranced to meet their doom in the Weser river.

When the ungrateful town council did not pay up (the piper was a freelancer and these were straitened times) he led away the town’s children and they were never seen again.

This time the plague is not quite so bad and the methods not quite so drastic. But rat-catchers are in vogue again.

“We already have a rat-catcher working for the council,” said Thomas Wahmes, a spokesperson, “and he is using about 40 traps with poisoned bait.”

Not enough, it seems. The infestation has got out of hand. “We have to take this very seriously indeed because the rat population is growing fast,” he explained.

Echoing a call that was last heard in Hamelin 724 years ago, he said it might be necessary to call in someone from outside the town — a specialist.

“The problem is the allotment gardens on the fringes of the town. So much rubbish is lying around there that the district has become like a banquet on a table, an open buffet for the rats.” As a result, rat packs have swollen from the usual 20 to 30 to more than 200, and they are having a ball.

The fact is that across Germany, rat-catcher has become a copper-bottomed, recession-proof profession. Strict rubbish disposal regulations — binmen weigh bags on their trucks and reject heavier or ill-sorted loads — mean that uneaten food is often flushed down the lavatory.

This makes German sewers a fast-food paradise for Rattus norvegicus, the most common city rodent. Other packs of rats are coming to the surface around large-scale construction projects.

In Berlin, Henner Schmidt, a senior member of the city’s Free Democratic Party, suggested that those receiving benefits should be encouraged to form rat-catching squads in the capital.

“A few hundred people should form a circle and scare the rats out of flower boxes and other hiding places,” he said. The rats should then be beaten with sticks and the successful rat-catchers rewarded to the tune of 1 euro per dead rodent. “Everybody who needs to earn extra should be allowed to become a rat bounty-hunter,” he said.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about this kind of job creation. Some believe that rat-killing should be left to professionals, the modern-day Pied Pipers.

“Rats are mammals and shouldn’t be killed just like that,” said Dr Hans-Joachim Bathe-Peters, official veterinarian for central Berlin. “You can’t just chop it with a spade or kick it to death, that would be against the animal protection laws.”

Dr Anke Elvers-Schreiber, of the health and welfare office in Berlin, said she didn’t think that rathunts were sensible. “Rats keep their distance and when they start to run, they can outrun humans.”

All eyes will now be on Hamelin (Hameln in German — Browning added an extra vowel to help with the scansion of his poem).

The town has made a good living out of the legend. Bakeries produce rat-shaped bread rolls; there are rat-catcher guided tours and a musical called Rats!

The suspicion is, naturally, that Hamelin is talking up its rat problem to promote the 725th anniversary of the Pied Piper next year.

Wahmes demurs. “Believe me, we would be very happy if we cracked our rat problem by next summer when we will celebrate the Piper legend,” he says.

Even so, the burghers of Hamelin would be well advised to hide their children if they spot a musical rodent control operative in the neighbourhood. Or — the other lesson from 1376 — make sure that council funds are available to pay the piper.

THE TIMES, LONDON