Someone left these containers of rats — with 280 in all — on the side of Hemlock Road in Foster on Tuesday.

Foster Police photo

FOSTER — The police and the Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are trying to find out who left 280 dead or starving rats in eight containers on the side of Hemlock Road Tuesday.

Dr. E.J. Finocchio, president of the Rhode Island SPCA and a veterinarian for 45 years, said what Foster police found on Hemlock Road Tuesday was “the grossest, most sickest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

The rats, many of them weighing as much as 2 pounds, were crammed into three glass aquariums, two bird cages and three cat carriers, he said, so many that they were constantly climbing over each other. At the bottom of one aquarium there was a 6-inch layer of dead rats with live rats living on top of the corpses. Some had resorted to cannibalism, he said.

Foster Police Chief Robert E. Coyne Jr. said the police got two calls at about 2:50 p.m. Tuesday by people who had driven down Hemlock Road and spotted the containers on the ground about 20 feet from the road.

“The stench was pretty terrible,” Coyne said. “It was pretty gross.”

Hemlock Road is a local road that runs along the northwest section of the land around the Scituate Reservoir and is not a through street. Coyne said the police were working on the initial assumption that the person who left the rats either lives in the area or is familiar with it.

“It’s so far off the beaten path,” he said. “It’s so far out there.”

The police think the rats were dropped off sometime between 10:30 a.m. and 2:50 p.m., when the calls came in. That is partly based on how visible the containers were and because the open end of one the aquariums was covered with a plastic trash bag, meaning that after some time the rats would have suffocated.

“I have never, ever seen anything like this in my life,” Finocchio said.

Coyne said the rats were the type that might be sold as food for owners of exotic pets such as snakes, or to pet shops or laboratories.

Finocchio said that, judging by the number, the rats may have been left by someone who was raising them commercially, saw the market collapse and wanted to get rid of them.

“But they had options,” he said of whomever left the animals. “They could have called us.

“Despite the fact that they are rats, they are living things,” he said. “You just can’t do that.”

The SPCA is offering a $750 reward in the case, Finocchio said, asking that anyone with information call him at (401) 438-8150. Coyne said the Foster police were likewise asking anyone who may have seen something in the area on Tuesday or who thinks they may have a lead to call the police at (401) 397-3317.

Of the 280 rats, 72 were dead and 208 were in varying degrees of life, he said. All the surviving rats had to be euthanized individually, by hand, by SPCA members, he said. The bodies were cremated, though a half-dozen or so corpses were frozen to be used as evidence in any criminal prosecution.

It was unlikely that the SPCA would find anyone to adopt the 208 surviving rats, he said, and even if they could, there was no way of knowing whether the animals were diseased or posed other health dangers. The euthanizing was unavoidable, he said, but it was still difficult for the SPCA members.

“They’re not small creatures,” Finocchio said. “They’re bigger than kittens.”

By law, he said, the rats could not be euthanized as a group, say in a chamber with a lethal gas. Each animal had to be put down individually. That involved SPCA members picking the rats one at a time, holding it while he or she injected the rat with a poison and then waiting for it to die in their hands.

jhill@projo.com