- Sullivan, Robert.
Rats.
New York: Bloomsbury, [2004] 2005. ISBN 1-58234-477-9.
-
Here we have one of the rarest phenomena in publishing: a
thoroughly delightful best-seller about a totally disgusting
topic: rats. (Before legions of rat fanciers write to berate
me for bad-mouthing their pets, let me state at the outset that
this book is about wild rats, not pet and laboratory
rats which have been bred for docility for a century and a
half. The new afterword to this paperback edition relates the story
of a Brooklyn couple who caught a juvenile Bedford-Stuyvesant
street rat to fill the empty cage of their recently deceased
pet and, as it it matured, came to regard it with such fear
that they were afraid even to release it in a park lest it turn
and attack them when the cage was opened—the author suggested
they might consider the strategy of “open the cage and run
like hell” [p. 225–226]. One of the pioneers
in the use of rats in medical research in the early years
of the 20th century tried to use wild rats
and concluded “they proved too savage to maintain in
the laboratory” [p. 231].)
In these pages are more than enough gritty rat facts
to get yourself ejected from any polite company should you
introduce them into a conversation. Many misconceptions
about rats are debunked, including the oft-cited estimate
that the rat and human population is about the same,
which would lead to an estimate of about eight million rats in
New York City—in fact, the most authoritative estimate
(p. 20) puts the number at about 250,000 which is
still a lot of rats, especially once you begin
to appreciate what a single rat can do.
(But rat exaggeration gets folks' attention: here is a
politician
claiming there are fifty-six million rats in
New York!)
“Rat
stories are war stories” (p. 34), and this book
teems with them, including The Rat that Came Up the Toilet,
which is not an urban legend but a well-documented urban nightmare.
(I'd be willing to bet that the incidence of people keeping
the toilet lid closed with a brick on the top is significantly
greater among readers of this book.)
It's common for naturalists who study an animal to develop
sympathy for it and defend it against popular aversion: snakes
and spiders, for example, have many apologists. But not rats:
the author sums up by stating that he finds them “disgusting”,
and he isn't alone. The great naturalist and wildlife artist
John James Audubon, one of the rare painters ever to depict
rats, amused himself during the last years of his life in New
York City by prowling the waterfront hunting rats, having
received permission from the mayor “to shoot Rats
in the Battery” (p. 4).
If you want to really get to know an animal species, you
have to immerse yourself in its natural habitat, and
for the Brooklyn-based author, this involved no more than
a subway ride to
Edens
Alley in downtown Manhattan, just a
few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, which was
destroyed during the year he spent observing rats there.
Along with rat stories and observations, he sketches
the history of New York City from a ratty perspective, with
tales of the arrival of the brown rat (possibly on ships carrying
Hessian mercenaries to fight for the British during the
War of American Independence), the rise and fall of rat fighting as
popular entertainment in the city, the great garbage
strike of 1968 which transformed the city into something
close to heaven if you happened to be a rat, and the 1964 Harlem
rent strike in which rats were presented to politicians by the
strikers to acquaint them with the living conditions in their
tenements.
People involved with rats tend to be outliers on the scale of human
oddness, and the reader meets a variety of memorable characters,
present-day and historical: rat fight impresarios, celebrity exterminators,
Queen Victoria's rat-catcher, and many more. Among numerous fascinating
items in this rat fact packed narrative is just how recent
the arrival of the mis-named brown rat,
Rattus norvegicus, is.
(The species was named in England in 1769, having been believed to
have stowed away on ships carrying lumber from Norway. In fact, it appears
to have arrived in Britain before it reached Norway.) There were
no brown rats in Europe at all until the 18th century (the rats
which caused the Black Death were
Rattus rattus,
the black rat, which followed Crusaders returning from the Holy Land).
First arriving in America around the time of the Revolution, the brown
rat took until 1926 to spread to every state in the United States,
displacing the black rat except for some remaining in the South and
West. The Canadian province of Alberta remains essentially rat-free to
this day, thanks to a vigorous and vigilant rat control programme.
The number of rats in an area depends almost entirely upon the food
supply available to them. A single breeding pair of rats, with an
unlimited food supply and no predation or other
causes of mortality, can produce on the order of fifteen
thousand descendants in a single year. That makes it pretty clear
that a rat population will grow until all available food is being
consumed by rats (and that natural selection will favour the most
aggressive individuals in a food-constrained environment). Poison or
trapping can knock down the rat population in the case of a severe
infestation, but without limiting the availability of food, will
produce only a temporary reduction in their numbers (while driving
evolution to select for rats which are immune to the poison and/or
more wary of the bait stations and traps).
Given this fact, which is completely noncontroversial among
pest control professionals, it is startling that in New York
City, which frets over and regulates public health threats
like second-hand tobacco smoke while its denizens suffer
more than 150 rat bites a year, many to children, smoke-free restaurants
dump their offal into rat-infested alleys in
thin plastic garbage bags, which are instantly penetrated by
rats. How much could it cost to mandate, or even provide,
rat-proof steel containers for organic waste, compared to the budget
for rodent control and the damages and health hazards of
a large rat population? Rats will always be around—in 1936,
the president of the professional society for exterminators
persuaded the organisation to change the name of the occupation
from “exterminator” to “pest control
operator”, not because the word “exterminator”
was distasteful, but because he felt it over-promised what could
actually be achieved for the client (p. 98). But why not
take some simple, obvious steps to constrain the rat population?
The book contains more than twenty pages of notes in narrative
form, which contain a great deal of additional information you
don't want to miss, including the origin of giant inflatable
rats for labour rallies, and even a poem by exterminator guru
Bobby Corrigan. There is no index.
August 2006 