Are rats actually that bad?

The rodent’s reputation, revamped

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Are rats actually that bad?

last update on 16 Sep 2024

At Tanzania’s Sokoine University of Agriculture, about 125 miles west of Dar es Salaam, there is a small memorial to Magawa, an awardee of the PDSA Gold Medal, known as the “animals’ George Cross,” for “life-saving devotion to duty.” Magawa was a rat who worked for the Tanzania-based demining charity Apopo and was responsible for sniffing out more than 100 land mines in Cambodia. The NGO’s “HeroRATs” are now expanding their remit, detecting cases of tuberculosis in samples sent from across Tanzania to Sokoine’s laboratories. Magawa and his fellow African giant pouched rats clearly confound humanity’s aversion to the rodents. Journalist Joe Shute uses Magawa’s story to show that people who just want to eradicate rats have got it wrong. His new book, Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat, hopes to redefine the relationship between rats and people across continents and centuries.

Stowaway taps into a growing market for books that use an animal as a lens for exploring the Anthropocene—the most recent period of geological time, one marked by humanity’s impact on the climate and natural ecosystems.

These books, such as Leila Philip’s recent Beaverland, can have aspects in common with the earlier trend in commodity histories (Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, for instance). Human hunting, fishing, and exploitation affect where animals live and how many of them there are, but these human processes also shape what it means to be human. In Cod and Beaverland, the overexploitation of these animal populations for industrial production and international competition means that cod fishing and beaver trapping are also declining as industries in which people with specialised skills and knowledge can find work. Whole ways of life are disappearing or require interventions and protections from government agencies.

Stowaway is different, though some aspects of the genre remain, including both the occasionally wistful tone and the investigative journalist’s keen eye for a compelling paradox. Shute opens with a striking provocation: that everyone has a rat story. Unlike more exotic animals that have shaped and been shaped by human history, rats, he points out, are everywhere (though, as becomes clear over the course of the book, not as prevalent as we tend to think they are). The Norway rat, or brown rat, certainly seems to be wherever humans tend to be. And this is a major component of Shute’s story.

Humans and rats are, in fact, very similar. Shute speculates that we may be “symbiotic”—there are plenty of indications throughout the book that the worst of rat behaviour is merely a mirror for the worst of human behaviour. This reflection of ourselves is, perhaps, why we find them so distasteful. But, Shute argues, we should be redirecting our distaste away from rats to the human processes that enable them.

Take the bubonic plague. Responsible for the deaths of an estimated 25 million people in the 14th century, this event, which comes up frequently in the book, was historically blamed on rats travelling aboard ships from China that then snuck out at port after port across the Mediterranean and throughout Europe. We know now that it wasn’t the rats but the fleas they carried that brought the plague. It was nonetheless a human technology and human trade that made the transport of both the rats and the fleas possible.

Rats, Shute implies, took the blame for human globalisation and urbanisation. In a 2018 study, he cites, “researchers claimed the speed at which the disease spread meant human-borne fleas and lice were more likely responsible for causing so many millions of deaths.”

Shute argues, we should be redirecting our distaste away from rats to the human processes that enable them.

As with the cod fisherman and the beaver trapper, Shute's narrative also alights on the dying art of rat catching. Some of the most colourful sections of the book follow rat catchers as they explain their relationships with the animals they seek to exterminate. The rat catchers, the fancy rat enthusiasts, the scientists, the obsessive rat writers: These people are the varied and strange colonies that Shute's book opens up as much as the rat colonies themselves.

Rats, however, are no cute, weird, trapped-to-near-extinction beavers. They are not the once abundant, now endangered cod. Rats follow human habitation. Shute argues that one reason for their proliferation in cities and farms is that, in those areas, humans have wiped out or pushed away their natural predators. Humanity offers an unusual protection for rats by becoming the apex predator itself—which means that humans alone are responsible for both the spread of rats and their control. Shute argues that the "intelligence, adaptability and willingness to work to our benefit" make the rat a great partner, as the example of Magawa shows. "The main hurdle" to the development of this partnership, Shute writes, "is human prejudice."

This sounds straightforward enough. Humanity surely has a painful track record in allowing prejudice—particularly against other humans—to impede progress. And Shute has plenty of ready proof that rats are not straightforwardly the nightmarish animal that Winston faces in George Orwell's 1984 or that terrorises Indiana Jones in the catacombs below Venice or that die ominously on the streets of Oran in Albert Camus's The Plague.

The life and death of Shute's own fancy rats, Molly and Ermintrude, form a domestic narrative arc to his book. The black rats of Britain may only exist in a few remaining colonies. And in Alberta, Canada, rats have been entirely and purposefully wiped out.

Despite these efforts to redeem the rats' reputation, the community around Sokoine in Morogoro, Tanzania, provides more than enough evidence for understanding the "human prejudice" that faces rats. While they may not have been the cause of the bubonic plague, rats "are responsible for causing more than 400 million infections in people each year spread through bites, the fleas they transport, urine and their breath," Shute writes. The problem, he explains, "is getting worse" as cities grow.

One Tanzanian man told Shute that his wife had been diagnosed with typhus because of the rats that burrow into their houses, bite their children, and steal their food. One scientist, a self-described "lover of rats," still argued that if "we spent the same amount of money on rodent control as malaria control it would have a hundred times the impact on people's lives."

One reason for the proliferation of rats in cities and farms is that humans have wiped out their natural predators

In Edmonton, Alberta's capital, Shute finds his most fitting rat-human metaphor. Right after World War II, Alberta declared war on the rat. The population of rats in the agricultural province had come in with the railroad. Colonies had sprung up in the 1920s across the plains in neighboring Saskatchewan, Canada's breadbasket, and began to spread toward Alberta at an estimated rate of "15 miles every year." With the growth of commercial agriculture in Alberta, officials decided to tackle the problem at the province's borders before it was too late.

New advancements in chemical warfare were turned on the rat population: warfarin, strychnine, and anticoagulant poisons. These spread, Silent Spring style, through the general wildlife population, causing collateral damage far beyond the intended brown rats. Wartime propaganda outlets were also turned to this new enemy: "Rats are coming!" "Let's keep 'em out!" "The only good rat is a dead rat." But rats are not the only victims of the region's monoculture, nor are they the only victims of poison. In the tunnels beneath Edmonton, the city is rat-free, but fentanyl, carried to Canada through global trade, ravages the human population.

The rat is an interesting subject for a book. As Shute details, they are most certainly widely misunderstood. Rats are not threatened by human interactions but depend on them. And people rely on rats—particularly for waste disposal—more than they realise. I'd probably still shudder if a rat ever crossed my path, but in bringing all of these stories together, Stowaway succeeds in challenging some of the most pervasive rat stereotypes.

But this book also exemplifies a much more interesting take on animal history: that rats might not strike us as "nature" and certainly not the kind of nature that we wish were protected as we reconsider the effects of the Anthropocene. What rats actually remind us—intentionally or not, as Shute frames it—is that people act like this. The equivalence throughout the book often feels uneven, though. "Not all rats" seems to be the book's refrain.

But a more interesting takeaway might come through extending the rat-human metaphor, offering the same grace to humans as to rats, understanding humanity as a problematic and misunderstood species: our needs and follies, our predatory and parasitic nature, our kindness and intelligence.

Humanity may have shaped the planet, adjusting it to our will. But we are a perpetually misunderstood species of animal, too, and if we are going to survive climate change, poison, warfare, and dehumanisation, we must extend the same compassion to ourselves that we increasingly see the need for among the cuter, or more obviously useful, animals.

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