Paris prepares warm Olympics welcome - except for rats

PARIS: While the Paris Olympics is set to be a festival of socialising and intermingling, city authorities are keen for visitors not to encounter any of the capital's notorious furry inhabitants.

Humorously portrayed in the hit animated film "Ratatouille", the French capital's abundant rat population is no joke for the city's residents - and could be an embarrassment as the Olympics spotlight falls on Paris.

"All of the Olympic sites and celebration areas were analysed (for rats) before the Games," deputy mayor Anne-Claire Boux, who has responsibility for public health, told AFP in an interview.

As well as ordering a deep clean to remove any food residues that might tempt the scurriers from their underground lairs, the mayor's rodent specialists also worked to close up exit points from the sewers around the sites.

"Where there were areas with lots of rats we put traps in place ahead of the Games," Boux continued, adding that both mechanical rat traps and chemical solutions were used to reduce troublesome populations.

The park behind the Eiffel Tower, where the beach volleyball games are set to take place, and the Louvre gardens, where the Olympic cauldron is set to burn, are popular picnic spots - and previously rat-infested.

"Ultimately, no one should aim to exterminate Paris's rats, and they're useful in maintaining the sewers," she added. "The point is that they should stay in the sewers."

Paris vermin, a feature in French literature from Les Miserables to The Phantom Of The Opera, are frequently drawn into a contemporary debate about cleanliness in the French capital.

Current mayor Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist who relies on support from the Greens, is regularly accused by her conservative critics of failing to keep the capital