[Time for another unwritten book. This one, the story of rats, alongside cockroaches victims of almost universal condemnation, but, again like the ’roach, most likely to survive a post-apocalyptic world. I like them. Over the years I had eighteen as companions, usually in pairs. It has been suggested that my affection springs from my people’s equation with their negative aspects, though as far as I know rats are not alleged hoarders of money (I did have a pet one who did hoard, but only spaghetti, donated from our plates), supposed killers of any Messiah, nor the bêtes noir of any rival monotheistic religions. Nor, I am sure, do they turn up their whiskered noses at pork, shellfish nor indeed pretty much anything they might rate as edible. They are, it must be said, clever and, like all designated villains, resourceful, but since when, other than to the envious and stupid, are these qualities a sin. It may equally be that in their relegation to the margins, they fit perfectly with my life’s work and fascination, the marginal language that is slang. And like slang, however unpopular, they remain an intrinsic part of human life. They have, to me, but a single fault, and that is inborn, not cultivated: their lifespan is sadly short. Street rats may not make it much beyond a single year, while their domesticated cousins rarely pass beyond three. For me at least, the death of such relatively tiny creatures has always left a huge hole in my life.]
Rats are not man’s best friend. They are, as legends, stereotyping and the end product of millennia of repulsion attest, humanity’s number one animal enemy, both in fact and metaphor. Deliberately or otherwise they kill us – ravaging crops, spreading the worst of diseases – and we reciprocate in kind, devising ever more potent means of destruction, whether a Pied Piper, poisons that freeze them inside out or the sadistic glue trap. Simultaneously they help us live, dying in their thousands in the world’s laboratories, pinned down, injected, eviscerated, set running through mazes. Some of us, more than one might imagine, cherish them as intelligent, affectionate pets. But if they are not friends, then they are undoubtedly long-lived and intimate acquaintances. They are as tightly entwined with us as a ‘rat king’, that bizarre and unaccountable en-knotting of one tail with several others, often leading to mass death. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, ‘These are aggressive, active, omnivorous, adaptable, and fecund animals that live with man and have accompanied him almost throughout the world.’ There are more of them than us: a parallel universe – sympathetic or verminous, the choice is yours – both parasitical on humanity and at the same time quite self-contained.
Like us, they have colonised the world, often piggybacking on our discoveries and trade-routes to make their own journeys. Colonies of rats have been found in coal-mines where they once shared quarters with the pit ponies; on islands, too, rats will usually multiply prodigiously within a fairly short time, especially when brooding sea birds provide them with a profusion of food. The rats on St Helena would pull roosting chickens out of the trees at the time of Napoleon's exile. They bedevilled the trenches of World War I and have been traditionally associated with ships, scavenging food while the vessel floats, notoriously (if equally metaphorically) deserting when the ship goes down. Unlike humans they can survive an atomic blast.
Most intimately of all, they enter humanity’s food chain. They have been eaten without harm under stress – at the siege of Paris in 1871, and before that by the French garrison at Malta in 1798, where any form of food was so scarce that a rat carcass brought a high price. One Dr Kane of the arctic ship Advance ate rats through the winter, and avoided scurvy, from which his more fastidious companions all suffered. André Simon gives a rat recipe (something on the lines of angels on horseback), in his gastronomic encyclopaedia. Their taste is something like that of snipe. A ship’s rats, known as ‘millers’ when presented on the table (their frequent raids on the bread room left them covered in flour), provide a much-appreciated dish when all else has been consumed on one of Patrick O’Brian’s early 19th century men-of-war as portrayed in his Aubrey-Maturin saga. In China, from where it is believed the rat first set out to colonise Europe and thence the New World and where the rat is one of the dozen creatures selected to make the twelve year cycle on which the calendar is based, it was (is?) believed that rat flesh helps the hair grow.
With very few exceptions, the rat has what can at best be termed an unfortunate image. Verminous, disease-ridden, omnivorous, consumers of anything that doesn’t move, and not a little that does, dwellers in the rubbish dump and the sewer, never more active than in war or disaster, generally hidden yet more numerous than the humans on whom they prey, always taking, never giving – other than sickness and dirt – they combine both as animals and as metaphors the worst possible roles.
Typical is chapter 10 of Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression, entirely devoted to rats. It is determinedly hostile, setting at the rat’s door every negative adjective that can applied to man. They are ‘horrible brutes’, ‘veritable murder specialists’, ‘bloody tragedies’, ‘victorious murderers’, ‘one of the most horrible and repulsive things’; he talks of their ‘terrible fate’, ‘sharp, shrill satanic cry’, the ‘group hate between rat-clans’. The over-riding theme is that these rat-clans are engaged in ‘constant warfare . . . the collective aggression of one community against another’. Lorenz is not alone among the intellectuals. Sigmund Freud produced an entire book, focused on a patient known only as ‘the Rat-Man’.
At the same time the rat has joined the pantheon of gods (rats were among the deities of Ancient Egypt; in India a rat always accompanies the elephant god Ganesha), credited with far-seeing, oracular wisdom (greying 300 year-old rat prophets appear in the folklore of many of Europe’s countries). Through an ambivalent media the rat has appeared both as the epitome of terror (Orwell’s 1984), the wise old seer (Splinter of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame), as propagandist’s tool (the Jew/rat equation of Nazi Germany: if Jews are vermin, then what choice does one have but extirpate them) or as an anti-Semite’s (‘The rats are underneath the piles,’ wrote T.S. Eliot, ‘The Jew is underneath the lot. | Money in furs.’) and even as saviour (breakfast television's Roland Rat). The queen of anthropomorphism, Beatrix Potter, naturally offered her literary rat (Samuel Whiskers) as did Kenneth Grahame: his Water Rat modelled, in part, on the Oxford Dictionary lexicographer (and boating fanatic) Frederick Furnivall. On Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, rats are the only species, echoing man, who have their own, category-specific Death (‘Death of Rats’), complete with cowled cloak, skeletal body and a tiny scythe.
Linguistically ‘rat’ is a constantly emotive term. Slang offers some 66 compounds and phrases that feature the word. None are especially positive though some are neutral, such as the image of speed: like a rat up a drainpipe, or simply descriptive like rat’s tail, a pig-tail, once a fashionable male hairstyle or rat’s castle, a prison. Perhaps the great image is of the tell-tale, the informer. You dirty rat! cries James Cagney (even if he didn’t – the nearest line, from Taxi! in 1932, ran ‘You dirty, double-crossing rat!’); as a description it is among the earlier English words, appearing in a glossary of 1000 as raet. Through the Latin rodere, to gnaw, the rodent is cousin to ‘erode’ and ‘corrode’. And earlier still in a pleasant paradox, the Sanskrit root word, rada, to scratch, lies behind both rat and elephant.
As informers and cowards we rat on and rat out, as martyrs or bullies we get rats and give them, and as madmen we have them ‘in the attic’. Struggling to and from work, up and down the ladders of promotion we see ourselves entrapped in a rat race. They serve for satire: ‘Rats. Of these there are the following kinds: a black rat and a grey rat, a py-rat and a cu-rat’, as the slang collector and army quartermaster Francis Grose put it in 1785. In late 1990s Brazil the country’s top TV show was Ratinho Livre (Ratlet Live, Ratinho himelf being the nickname of Carlos Roberto Massa, equally celebrated as a businessman and politician), a programme widely seen as rendering America’s schlockmeister Jerry Springer as anodyne as Mickey M. himself.
They are the stuff of our dreams and nightmares and of our superstitions (never say ‘rat’ on a fishing boat; dream of rats and you will be attacked; rats reappearing after many years is sign of war). They have achieved the potency of legend: the rodent victims of the Rattenfänger von Hameln, better known as the Pied Piper, or the rats that serve as dei ex machina for London’s rags-to-riches Lord Mayor Dick Whittington. Terry Pratchett turned the legend on its head in his Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) (the former being a cat, the latter adding human speech to their innate skills). Unsurprisingly they are fêted in nursery rhymes, but less so in cartoons, where Disney’s anodyne rodent has long held away. They have, like so many hapless animals, provided us with sport: from the 1850s to 1880s whether at McLaughlin’s Bear-pit in New York City, or Jimmy Shaw’s sporting public house in Soho, London, rat-baiting was a hugely popular diversion, the subject of high wagers and productive of cosseted champion terriers, lording it over literal piles of verminous corpses. (Victorian London offered 70 pits). Sometimes it was even more intimate: by the late nineteenth century it was men, in specially weighted boots, who were pitted against the rat.
The intention of this book would be to look at all aspects of the rat, from reality to image, from fact to metaphor. And above all to record and analyse the millennia of interaction between two outwardly different, but inwardly all too similar species. With possible exception of dogs and cats, both of whom have a relatively black-and-white image, the rat is the animal most intimately linked to humanity.
I had 2 pet rats for a time. The ones bred as pets—even the ones sold as snake food—can be very friendly and affectionate. The wild ones, not so much.