Most of biodiversity is not considered charismatic and from human’s perspective it can be indifferent, problematic, harmful, disgusting, or dangerous. Secondary school students’ attitudes towards an unloved species and how it relates to their feelings of disgust in the context of a biology course were studied during a citizen science project where Finnish lower and upper-secondary school students surveyed the occurrence of urban rats. Questionnaire data was collected including items on four scales: attitude towards rats, interest in learning about environment, disgust, and liking biology as a school subject. It was modelled with an item response theory approach by including respondents’ age and gender as fixed variables and school as a random factor. Higher age correlated with a more positive attitude towards the environment and lower level of disgust. There was an interaction between age and gender that male students had more negative attitude towards rats and lower general levels of disgust. Surprisingly, the students with more positive attitude towards rats also not only had a higher liking biology as a school subject and positive attitude towards the environment, but also a higher level of general disgust. The results suggest that disgust in general is not detrimental in learning and appreciating unloved others as parts of biodiversity. The results also raise questions on how personal attitudes towards the individual species relate to attitudes toward more abstract concept of biodiversity or the environment.