p. 41 “(Between 2.9 million and 0.9 million years ago), the brown rat diverged from from the other Eurasian Ratus species (of which there are more than 60 distinct rodents in the genus today). Nowadays the two most common species around the world are the brown rat Rattus norvegicus (the one you will see scuttling around the streets at night), and the black rat (Rattus rattus, once common in Britain but now driven to the edge of localised expinction and displaced by their larger and more aggressive cousins, who are better suited to colder northern European climates).
At some undetermined point in their history, both species firmly yoked themsleves to human activity and spread across the world from their native homes of the Indian subcontinent, in the case of the black rat, and China, in the case of the brown.
Over millennia rats have followed the rise and fall of empires … In 2022, the first acnient genetic study of the black rat …. concluded that the black rat colonised Europe at least twive. The rats arrived with the Romans and perhaps even disappeared with the collapse of their empire… only to return when long-range international trade resumed during the medieval period. ,,, various studies in Germany … have discovered the remains of what are thought to be contemporary brown rats in former medieval settlements, including the village of Klein Freden, near Salzglitter, which was occupied between the 9th and 13th centuries”. (But hard to date rats, because they borrow down through archaeological layers!!)
p. 45 “In their native far-east, rats are viewed with far more appreciation than the lands they have invade. The rat is the first sign of the Chinese Zodiac, indicating charm, intelligence and gregariousness. In Japan, rats appeared widely in historical artworks as symbols of familial prosperity and social scuccess. In one surviving early 17th-century Japanese manual of mathematics, children were even taught geometry using symbols of rats. And in India, the elephant god Ganesha travels the world on a rat to help remove any obstacle in his path.”
p. 46 “Rats … are nature’s anarchists, subverting and challenggin our own carefully constructed hierarchies”…. “Banksy… who during the first lockdown in 2020 sneaked onto a Circle Line tube train to spray images of rats sneezing and parachuting face masks, celebrates the urban rat because ‘they exist without permission’.”
p. 49 Gunther Grass The Rat, … “narrator receiving a caged female rat for Christmas, a gift which sparks a long and rambling history of the world from a rat’s perspective. The ‘She-rat’,,, talks to him in his dreams and outlines a dystopian future in which humans have destroyed themselves with nuclear weapons and the rats are in charge. Around the time Grass was writing… it was known that rats living on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean had survived nuclear tests conducted there… in 1998, a team of Russian researchers… discovered that rats did have significantly higher survival rates than any other species. This haridness is in part fown to rats’ natural – and remarkable – tolerance to hypoxia”.
p. 58 “When it rains in Delhi and their burrows are flooded… there is a kind of rat amnesty declared for the rodents, scurrying to find new homes. People will not kill them when they are clearly desperate and in need.”
“Maan Barua, a lecturer in human geography at Cambridge University who focuses on urban ecologies and novel ways of understanding the flow of the city… his work on how non-human life utilises infrastructure to its own ends….. Barua arges that “infrastructures have became a vital thread in understanding the intensity and scale of other-than-human movement”.
p. 63 “Researchers found the dry rats would regularly aid those trapped in the water by opening the door. However, when they shared the box with no water in, they were far less likely to operate the button to lift the divide. This, the team of scientists concluded, demonstrated the rats were not merely rescuing each other out of companionship but through a genuine sense of empathy with those who were struggling. The researchers introduced one final curveball into the experiment, placing the temptation of chocolate cereal for the dry rat on the platform, with the option that it could either eat that,, or rescue the rat in the pool. The rodents chose to help their companions above doing for the chocolate between 50 and 80 epr cent of the time…. studying brain networks at University of California Berkeley, “using a range of diagnostic tools to monitor the neural pathways in rats as they responded to trapped companions, they concluded that they react in much the same way as people, registering an emotional reaction to any rat in distress, but being far more likely to leap into action when it is a companion they recognise.”
p. 66 “Follwing an 80% reduction in rodents in a location, the population will subsequently increase between 3 and 20% per week as new rats fill the vacuum. Within as little as four weeks following any control measures, rat populations can rebound to more or less what they were before.”p. 67 “Canadian public health researcher Chelse Himsworth recently argued that rat-related issue should be treated as a result of policy failure. Rather than wasting time attempting to eradicate rats, city leaders should focus attention on the deprived inner-city neighbourhoods that are disproportionately impacted. Better waste collection, tougher rules on littering, greater community cohesion and reducing antisocial behaviour can all help reduce rat activity without the need to bait a single trap.”
“Researchers proposed Amsterdam’s rodents be considered as denizens of the city rather than invaders. Their burrowing, gnawing, rat runs and encounters with humans can all be understood as “acts of denizenship”… staking their own claims on the built environment.”
“If left alone, and with access to food, urban rat populations will remain entrenched in the same locations for many generations, if not centuries. A recent archaeological study of the ruins of Sheffield Castle (demolished during the English Civil War in 1646 as a royalist stronghold) found … the remains of several black rats. These wer ein all likelihood residents of the slaughterhouses and market stalls that for 700 years filled the streets surrounding the castle. In 1296 Edward I granted a charter to the Lord of the Manor of Sheffield Thomas de Furnival, permitting a weekly Tuesday market and a three-day fair once a year. From then until the closure of Sheffield’s cattle market in 2013, the location was the centre of urban food trade – and a rat bazaar.
p. 69 “Outside of trading hours, the [Victorian] streets around the area were some of the city’s most prominent nightspots, roading with drunks, music halls, prize fights and betting rings. Several nearby pubs housed their own rat pits in which a dog was released and people would place bets on how many rodents it could kill. One larg rat pit at the Blue Bell Inn on Silver Street was operated by a local character called Fagey Joe, who boasted that his pitbull, Bullet, once killed 200 rats in 13 minutes. The landlord of another pub, the Clown and Monkey on Paradise Square, ended up in court accused by his neighbour of deliberately encouraging rats to breed in his basement to ensure a steady supply, leading to the nearby cellars being overrun. Sometimes the bets would take place in the open air in the marketplace itself, with bystanders cheering on the dogs as they mauled whichever rats they could hunt between the stalls.”
p. 85 “The ability of rats to both gnaw with their front teeth and chew with the back molars has given them the upper hands against other rodent species. While guinea pigs have evolved to chew and squirrels evolved to gnaw, the study found the rat can do both more effectively than the so-called ‘specialist’ species… shockingly powerful bit … more powerful (relative to bodyweight) than a hyena, grizzly bear, buill shark or hippopatamus, and foughtly 20 times the bite of a human… front incisors are open-rooted, meaning they never stop growing. Without continuously biying them down, these teeth will curl up like a ram’s horn inside a rat’s skull and ultimately cause it to die.”
p. 111 – mine-detecting rats
p. 141 Talking to rat catcher – thinks glue traps should be totally banned. “He is also highly critical of the use of aluminium phosphide…. ‘What are we doing stull using that?” he asks… “Are we in the dark ages?”
p. 152 “formation of the Vermin Repression Society in 1919. Based at 44 Bedford Row in London, the society represented a host of wealthy landowners and had access to the highest corridors of power, where they lobbied the government. Another member. Lord Lambourne, called in 1920 for a “crusade against rats to be carried out along national lines”… the government passed the Rat and Mice (Destruction) Act on 23 December 1919. The act placed a legal obligation on every private indivdual to destroy rodents and deal with any infestation on land or property they owned, or face a fine of £5. The act also called for the enforcement to be carried out by every local authority in the country. This marked a major escalation in rodent control…. The Vermin Repression Society discussed deploying the Boy Scouts nationwide and even considered a proposal emnating from a ‘professor of hygiene’ in Germany to deliberately circulate a cirus among rat populations, which he assured was not harmful to people. Even given the febrile atmosphere… this was ultimately deemed a step too far.”
o, 168 post-war, DDT etc “During this new chemical age, specialist poisons were concocted to dounter the rise of rodents, which, unlike other less adaptable animals, could rapidly flourish acorss the monoculutres created by industrial farming. Indeed, with no other predators around to speak of, they could thrive… anticoagulant warfarin … “A recent study conducted by the Campaign for Responsible Rodenticide Use UK claimed genes demonstrating resistance to anticoagulent rodenticide had been detected in 79 per cent of rats…. other natural predators higher up the food chain started increasingly falling victim, either through consuming the bait tjemselves or by eating stricken rats. … a second generation of even more powerful anticoagulent rodenticides soon came to market, around 100 to 1,000 times more toxic than warfarin. Five of these poisoned are currently authorised for use in Britain: disenacoum, bromadioline, brodifacoum, floucoumafen and difethialone.”
p. 169 “the likes of the Banr Owl Trust argue that rodenticides are almost certainly a significant cause of barn owl decline and remain an issue of serious concern for a host of other species”… including hedghogs, even though they don’t eat rats.
p. 214 “A 2013 study demonstrated that rodents can inherit fear from their forebears. … researchers taught male mice to associate the smell of cherry blossoms with mild shocks to their feet. Their pups were then raised with no exposure to the smell, but became immediately fearful if it was introduced… they were born with both enhanced olfactory sense to detect cherry blossom and be afraid of it. The study found that these inherited painful memories were passed on by the pups to the following generation as well.”
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