It could have been this tragic.
Few years ago a local failed car dealership was knocked down and replaced with a Whole Foods. My court is on a hill 40 feet above it. I can run down for beer and be back flying in the MA in 10 minutes it's that close to my house. The city didn't require the construction crew to exterminate the rat colony that lived in the building for almost 10 years.
My neigborhood cheered for the first day of construction then lived in a remake of "Ben" for 6 months without the Michael Jackson soundtrack. The local cats got eaten or went into hiding. We had rats everywhere day and night. During the ensuing rat war someone got the idea to saturate his back yard with piles of industrial Decon rat bait waifers. During the next week all of the dogs in the neigborhood either died from eating weakend rats or were at the vet getting their stomacs pumped. All the rats died or fled for parts unknown.
Everyone was pulling bags of dead rats from their crawl spaces for weeks after that. ......rats even ate all of the local mice, bugs, garbage in cans on the curb, leather garden gloves, visiting song birds, old leather shoes, garden hoses and chewed their way into crawl spaces to setup nests. Poor bunny by the way.