Credit: Steven Cottingham, Like Rats in the Walls of the World, 2022, digital inkjet print, 26 x 43 in (66 x 109 cm). Courtesy of the artist
The biologist bought stocks when rodent birth control went public. The barista had a hammer handy. The artist, who should have attended a meeting, trawled through a database and discovered an image of Venus in fur – snow-white fur. Pink tail and paws. And the alert, sensitive face of an animal that has been subjected to the violence of human observation many, many times.
Rats are known to be carriers of diseases. Less well known – if perhaps just as ubiquitous – rats act as vectors between perception and prejudice, imagination and behavior. How people respond to rats in our workplaces and homes demonstrates the level of our cruelty, innovation, and empathy — how ultimately willing we are to interact with species we occasionally keep as pets or laboratory animals, but almost always categorize as “other.” . ” In putting together this special edition of Public Seminary, I spoke to many people. From the biologist to the barista, from the site manager to the community gardener, everyone had a story to tell about rats.
After all, we’re so close. Rats and humans have such similar tastes that they follow us everywhere (except to Alberta – too cold). Rats work hard. They keep up with our peanut butter, our crops, our garbage collection, our overconsumption, our systemic injustice. Where the human social contract fails – for example in public housing with crumbling walls and dilapidated plumbing – rats thrive. Rafi Youatt traces the story of futile human efforts to eradicate rats and end our coexistence: “Not only do rats fill niches in the ecological sense, they fill socio-ecological niches.” Or as Curran Boyd puts it in his account of a winter he spent spent killing rats in an infested cafe, these commensal animals move into our abandoned infrastructure and set up “their ideal bed and breakfast.”
But while rats are busy making the best of our failures, we humans can’t keep up with their appetite for sex. A breeding pair has the potential to produce up to 15,000 offspring (across multiple generations) in a single year. We invent new traps – but new rats keep coming.
Recent innovations in rat control target their amazing fecundity, with implications for rats (and humans) around the world. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, the most recent budget for a national pest control program, Predator Free 2050, allocated NZ$2.25 million for research into a gene editing program that would manipulate rats into producing only offspring in their litters produce a sex. Across the world, in upstate New York, the Department of the Environment has approved for general use the drug ContraPest, a liquid bait laced with an “oral contraceptive” targeting both male and female rats. While the bait may be of limited use in cities with difficult-to-access tunnels and sewers, like New York and Washington, DC, ContraPest offers parks and neighborhoods a means of reducing rat populations that is non-toxic to the environment, other animals, and fellow wildlife to the rats themselves.
These developments could be a relief from the rhetoric of “warfare,” revenge, and bloodthirst favored by New York mayors. But Youatt’s essay reminds us to scrutinize any system of extermination – even a seemingly “humane” one – for its biopolitical implications: “The extermination of rats can be directly extrapolated to humans, called rats, as genocidal politics has done . ”
In particular, Predator Free 2050 in New Zealand raises questions, not only about the dangers of genetic modification, but also about the relative value of populations between different species. The government program’s mission – to protect endemic plant and animal species from introduced “pests” – is based on a hierarchy of perceived values introduced by European settlers, such as the species Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus. In her investigation of rat “blind memory”, Anna Boswell highlights the fact that Predator Free 2050 also targets the Kiore or Pacific rat (Rattus exulans), a species that traveled to Aotearoa, New Zealand with Māori centuries earlier . “Make a mistake [kiore] for rats of the Northern World,” writes Boswell, “in obscuring their role in the te ao Māori as respected traveling companions who remember migratory paths, Pacific homelands, and shared genealogies.” In Boswell’s analysis, targeting Kiore is in an “ecological Purge” part of a larger settler-colonial act of error-memory—an attempt to erase an uncomfortable history.
But rats continue to bear witness. And the closeness of our shared history, as well as our many assassination attempts (both on their bodies and on their characters) have certainly sharpened rats’ noses for the hint of human hypocrisy. They are familiar with our poisons and our propaganda. Perhaps it is this training that helps rats win leading roles in our political satires. There they are recognized as multifaceted actors, capable of embodying both victims and perpetrators of violence – sometimes simultaneously. This duality is embodied in the monstrous body of “Scabby,” a giant inflatable rat who shows up at US companies to protest labor rights violations. As Cassandra Brey points out in a brief biography of the balloon rodent, Scabby’s testimony parodies both corporate “rat-like” greed and the protection of the striking workers, who greet the giant rat with affection.
In human political theater, the rat actor is almost always a proxy for human causes: a mask with round ears and whiskers, beneath a human mouth. But what do rats see when they look in the mirror? Reversing the literary tradition of rats as politicized bodies, Radhika Subramaniam offers a vision of rats as political bodies. Their “Report from the Rat Academy” charts a democracy as meticulously bureaucratic as our own, but focused on undeniably seedy causes (eras of sanitary vehicles, chewing, and “radical burrow network” technologies).
Rats’ concerns are common to all urban animals — roaches, pigeons, mice, wildcats — that humans categorize as “vermin” or unwanted. Some scholars and scientists, including Loretta Mayer, co-founder of Senestech, ContraPest’s parent company, have observed that it is precisely the success of rodents that causes problems for humans. Rats shouldn’t thrive in the city amid concrete and broken glass — or in parklands reserved for protected species, by the way. Almost everywhere rats travel, people perceive them as living in the wrong place.
Expelled from the zones of the “natural” and the “normal”, the rat wanders towards the avant-garde. In a dizzying passage from Marc Anthony Richardson’s experimental novel Year of the Rat, the narrator sees himself as a rat within the walls of his dying mother’s Philadelphia apartment. This image takes him back to a memory of San Francisco, where he and his mistress noticed one of the city’s dispossessed people sitting at a traffic intersection. The woman “was clutching something big and furry, wet and black: It had a semi-prehensile tail that curled around a forearm almost like that of a possum or a cat.”
The amazed narrator recalls that the woman not only stroked the giant rat in her lap, but that the rat “kissed her as if trying to bring great comfort in a time of greater distress.” Occupying an inadmissible space – loving and loved by a human – the rat shocks and reconfigures our vision. Richardson’s rat makes its habitat visible: the lived reality of human cities and the systems of racism, class and capital that create and enforce poverty.
Destigmatizing rats does not mean anyone has to suffer from rodent infestations and the destruction and disease that accompany them. “Nobody should have to live next to rats,” Caroline Bragdon observes in her conversation with Katy Einerson. As director of neighborhood assistance for New York City’s Pest Control Services, Bragdon points to the need for a “coordinated public health approach to rat control” with an emphasis on prevention: city officials, landlords, property owners and individuals hold each other accountable in the management of our waste.
It sounds easy. As so often, the problem is human.
Evangeline Riddiford Graham is Senior Managing Editor of Public Seminar and author of the volumes of poetry Ginesthoi (Hard Press, 2017) and La Belle Dame avec les Mains Vertes (Compound Press, 2019).
