The Devil's Lapdog

The human-rat relationship is complex and ancient.

Modern, urban rats live alongside us in a commensal relationship: they benefit from us but do not affect us. In cities, we forget about them as they exist off our detritus in a netherworld we'd rather not know about; at most they elicit a shriek or two as they scamper across our path on trash day.  

However, agriculturally, rats are a major pest, responsible along with other rodents for eating one-fifth of the world's food harvest, thus contributing to famine. This, along with the rat's disease-transmitting propensity, seems to earn the rat its ancient Chinese nickname of the "Devil's Lapdog."

But more on history later. Let's take a photographic journey of our views toward rats:

Hunted

1950s anti-rat campaign poster, Canda

Ignored

Subway rats, New York City

Revered

Ganesh riding a rat, statue, India

Anthropomorphized

Warren T. Rat, An American Tail

Studied
Lab Rat Treated with Blue Dye Infusion

 











Are rats just squirrels in uglier outfits, as Carrie Bradshaw would say, deserving of nothing more than our scorn and poison pellets?

Are they friendly pets? Or are the people who breed and show them one step up from those elderly people who hoard cats?

And what, if anything, can we learn about human nature by analyzing our visceral, emotional responses to rats?

This blog will take a semi-serious look at rats in our modern lives, as evidenced through first-hand accounts by our D.C. and NYC-based reports. In addition, we will analyze rats in popular culture.

Your homework? Sullivan's Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.


Source: Nature