Rats
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50 free Rats trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rats have lived beside people for thousands of years, and few animals are so widely feared, studied and quietly admired. They are clever, sociable and adaptable enough to thrive on every continent except Antarctica. This quiz covers the animal itself, from its senses and social life to its close relatives, along with the part rats have played in medicine, psychology, warfare and pest control. It also visits the rats of legend, religion, children's books, cinema and pop music. It suits animal lovers, pet rat owners, students and quiz hosts alike. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Crows gather in a murder and geese in a gaggle, but a group of rats is known as a what?
A mischief
A mischief is the usual collective noun for rats, although colony and horde are heard too. A scurry belongs to squirrels, a clowder to cats and a business to ferrets.
Q 02Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp found that rats give ultrasonic chirps, likened to laughter, when they are what?
Tickled
Tickled rats let out 50-kHz chirps, far too high for human ears, and they make the same calls during rough-and-tumble play.
Q 03Magawa, an African giant pouched rat awarded a PDSA Gold Medal in 2020, was trained to sniff out what?
Landmines
Landmines were Magawa's specialty: in five years in Cambodia he found 71 of them, and he was too light to set one off.
Q 04Which pizza-and-arcade chain got a rat mascot when Nolan Bushnell bought what he thought was a coyote costume?
Chuck E. Cheese
Chuck E. Cheese opened in San Jose in 1977, a passion project of Atari founder Bushnell, and its rat was redrawn as a guitar-playing mouse in 2012.
Q 05Which reflex are rats physically unable to perform, one reason that poison baits work so well against them?
Vomiting
Vomiting is impossible for rats and other rodents, so a swallowed poison stays down. Many rat poisons even include an emetic, which protects other animals without sparing the rats.
Q 06In the Chinese zodiac legend of the Great Race, the Rat finished first after riding on the back of which animal?
The Ox
The Ox carried the Rat on its back and was placed second in the twelve-year cycle, right behind its passenger.
Q 07Which singer's first solo US number one, Ben, was the theme song of a 1972 horror film about a boy's pet rat?
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson was 14 when Ben topped the Billboard Hot 100, and the ballad sung to a rat went on to earn an Academy Award nomination.
Q 08Which country's wartime Special Operations Executive stuffed dead rats with explosives to blow up German boilers?
Britain
Britain's agents never used the rat bombs, because the Germans intercepted the first shipment. The hunt for more wasted so much enemy effort that the plan was judged a success.
Q 09Which Canadian province declared rats a pest in 1950 and has been famed ever since as essentially rat-free?
Alberta
Alberta acted the moment rats advancing across the Prairies reached its eastern border, fearing plague and the loss of stored grain.
Q 10Which teeth of a rat never stop growing and must be worn down by constant chewing on hard materials?
Incisors
Incisors grow throughout a rat's life, and because the enamel on the front outlasts the softer dentine behind, each one wears into a chisel edge.
Q 11In Pixar's Ratatouille, which rat with a brilliant sense of smell dreams of becoming a chef in Paris?
Remy
Remy cooks by hiding under a kitchen boy's hat and steering him like a marionette by the hair. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Q 12In the Harry Potter series, Ron Weasley's pet rat Scabbers turns out to be which wizard in animal form?
Peter Pettigrew
Peter Pettigrew is unmasked in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, after a huge dog drags Ron and the rat into a tunnel beneath the Whomping Willow.
Q 13The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles learn ninjutsu from their adoptive father, a mutant rat known by which name?
Splinter
Splinter began in the original comics as the unusually clever pet rat of a Japanese ninja named Hamato Yoshi.
Q 21Male rats, like male rabbits, are known to breeders by which name?
Bucks
Bucks are the males, does the unmated females and dams the mothers, while baby rats are called pups or kittens.
Q 22Which East African burrowing rodent, a rat in name only, lives in colonies ruled by a single breeding queen?
Naked mole-rat
Naked mole-rat colonies run like beehives, with one queen breeding while the rest work, and the animals can live beyond 37 years, longer than any other rodent.
Q 23Which rodent of North America's deserts can go its whole life without drinking water?
Kangaroo rat
Kangaroo rats can get all the water they need from the seeds they eat, and they save more by producing very concentrated urine.
Q 14In which George Orwell novel does Winston Smith face torture by rats, his worst fear, inside Room 101?
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four saves its rats for the final stage of Winston's re-education, when the threat makes him beg for the torture to be turned on his lover Julia instead.
Q 15According to legend, which German town hired a piper in 1284 to lure away its rats, then lost its children?
Hamelin
Hamelin's Rat Catcher's House carries an inscription dating the loss of 130 children to 26 June 1284, although the rats only joined the tale around 1559.
Q 16Which bloodsucking parasites of rats are traditionally blamed for passing bubonic plague to humans?
Fleas
Fleas carry the plague bacterium in a blocked gut and regurgitate it into the next animal they bite, which is how it jumps from rats to humans.
Q 17Pet fancy rats and white laboratory rats were both bred from which wild species, also called the Norway rat?
Brown rat
Brown rat is the everyday name of Rattus norvegicus, which did not come from Norway at all: it is thought to have originated in northern China.
Q 18The Karni Mata Temple, where thousands of rats are revered, fed and allowed to run free, stands in which country?
India
India's Karni Mata Temple stands in Deshnoke, where the rats are called kabas and a glimpse of one of the few white ones counts as a special blessing.
Q 19Which Hindu god, worshipped as the remover of obstacles, is traditionally shown riding a rat or mouse?
Ganesha
Ganesha gained his rat late: his earliest images show no mount at all, and the animal began to appear at his feet in sculptures of the 7th century.
Q 20London rat-catcher Jack Black, who bred fancy rats to sell as pets, styled himself rat-catcher to which monarch?
Victoria
Queen Victoria was the patron Jack Black claimed, and by breeding the oddly colored rats he caught, he helped turn a pest into a pet.
Q 24A rat king, like the 32-rat specimen in a museum in Altenburg, is a group of rats bound together by what?
Their tails
Their tails become knotted, perhaps stuck by sap, gum or hair, and the Altenburg rat king was found mummified in a miller's fireplace in 1828.
Q 25Scientists at the University of Richmond taught rats to do what in 2019, rewarding them with pieces of cereal?
Drive tiny cars
To drive tiny cars, the 17 rats touched copper bars inside a clear plastic jar on wheels, and the task seemed to leave them more relaxed.
Q 26Which psychologist invented the chamber in which laboratory rats learn to press a lever for a food reward?
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner built the first one as a graduate student at Harvard, starting with rats before he moved on to pigeons.
Q 27Which psychologist taught the infant 'Little Albert' to fear a white rat by pairing it with a loud noise?
John B. Watson
John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner struck a steel bar with a hammer whenever the baby touched the rat, and Albert was soon upset by a rabbit and a fur coat too.
Q 28The first maze used to test learning in rats, built by Willard Small, copied the hedge maze at which English palace?
Hampton Court
Hampton Court's maze was suggested to Small by his adviser at Clark University, who reasoned that rats like to tunnel and can find their way home in the dark.
Q 29The 'Rat Park' experiments of the late 1970s gave rats a spacious, sociable home in order to study what?
Drug addiction
Drug addiction looked different in Rat Park: rats in the roomy colony drank less morphine water than rats kept alone in small metal cages.
Q 30Which blood-thinning medicine, still widely prescribed to people, first went on sale in 1948 as a rat poison?
Warfarin
Warfarin takes its name from WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and grew out of a hunt for whatever in spoiled sweet clover hay was making cattle bleed.