Rats do spread disease. Some experts believe they were not the vector for the black plague, but there are several other (many of which are quite recent) outbreaks where rats have unquestionably spread disease.
Take a look for yourself:
https://www.cdc.gov/rodents/diseases/direct.html
Personally I believe we should preserve human health over rat health, and a good way of doing that is to exterminate rats.
I kindly invite you to rent a room at the shittiest motel in town and learn to live and let live with bed bugs.
I’m not a fan of spiders or cockroaches. I can adapt my behavior so we rarely interact.
But, uh, miserable bloodsuckers-I don’t think there is any common ground for us to share.
But all they do is buzzing around my head when I try to sleep!
The government in their infinite wisdom hatched out a scheme were everyone has to pay per kilogram of produced waste so a lot of people were just dumping their trash. It was a 24/7 buffet for rats. Then, as only a country that has literally too much money can do, they sent out inspectors on to the streets to sift through the bags and fine people.
I'll have to look into if there have been studies on more systemic approaches to managing animal populations. Things like changing how/where food waste is stored.
Would you oppose lethal approaches to rodent control if they were more limited and directed? For example, a warehouse getting a cat or setting out some mouse traps.
https://www.amazon.com/Common-Sense-Pest-Control-Least-Toxic...
Sounds like what you're looking for. I've used its recommendations in the house I built, with good results. (For example, instead of foam I used a metal sill plate, which prevents insects from coming up through cracks in the foundation into the wood structure.)
The contractor groused about it, because he wasn't used to doing things that way. But he got excited about it after a while, and on his own fabricated stainless steel inserts that the windows would fit into that would prevent any leaks and rot around the windows. He was pretty proud of his work :-)
Another thing the book recommended was putting ground glass into the concrete mix, as rats won't chew it. But I didn't go that far.
The main thing is to make sure any gaps and vents have wire screens. Mice can get in where the plumbing enters the house, you can stop that by ramming steel wool between the pipe and the house.
Traps and poison are inhumane, cruel, and just bad karma, and usually come back to bite us somehow.
I think the solution is to tolerate and even appreciate the rats, and learn to share space with them.
Drown traps (using any number of mechanisms to dunk rodents into a bucket of water from which they cannot escape) might be a bit rough ethically though I think much better than glue traps. Additionally they're many times more effective, fully re-usable, and you can make them basically for free with a few scraps laying around in your garage. One method that works well on mice and other small rodents (though not so much on norway rats which are incredibly clever) is as simple as floating a layer of seeds on top of the water. The rodents jump in to get the seeds, not realizing that the seeds were floating on water. A bag of bird seed, a bucket and some water are all you need for that sort of trap and although death isn't instant, it's a lot faster than with a glue trap.
It's not much different than insects. We've chosen a few "pest" insects as the scapegoat/enemy and have bent over backwards trying to exterminate them. As a result, we've decimated all insect populations as collateral damage, severely damaging our own habitat, environment, and ecosystem, and again, poisoning ourselves in the process. Because... Everyone eats insects, and once there are no insects, there's nothing for them to eat!
Same thing with bacteria. We've decided that sterility is the way to go, and gone on a mad spree trying to kill all bacteria, forgetting that bacteria is how we digest food, so again, poisoning ourselves and damaging our own health, threatening ourselves in the process.
These are all living organisms that we are closely related to, sharing the same environment as us, and anything we do to them comes back to us.
Not only that, but our bodies are tuned over millions of years to coexist with them, and a sterile environment with all kinds of synthetic poisons in it, once again, fucks us up.
There is also the issue that computers and AIs are learning from us the way children learn from their parents, and will one day treat us the same way that we treat the "lower" species.