I’ve been thinking a lot about rats lately, and by that, I mean last night on my walk to Walgreens I saw a rat scurry into a sinkhole forming in the parking garage of my apartment building and it got me brooding. I often see rats around outside and around my apartment building. They’re crawling into sinkholes, scuttling under the dumpsters on my walk home from work, they’re crossing the street, probably to get home to their rat family and share with them the bounty of that night’s trash raid. I’ve lived in Chicago for about six years now and there have always been rats all around me, even when I couldn’t see them, and I’ve always been at peace with that.
Several months ago (I initially said weeks but what I’m about to detail happened in April so my concept of time is completely fucked) New York City appointed what they’ve dubbed their “rat czar,” whose job would be wholly dedicated to culling the rat population of their city. She donned a mock neck sweater, a mint green blazer, and some sensible aviator sunglasses as she held a press conference to discuss her plans of genociding one of New York’s most populous and vital communities. I didn’t watch her press conference, of course, I find the idea of killing whole populations of city rats to be rather morbid and vulgar, and this piece isn’t about the New York City rat czar or I would’ve bothered to capitalize her title. Rather, what I see in the rat czar and her plan to eliminate her rodent foe is a profound grandiosity and arrogance, anti-rat sentiment gone off the deep end and into dangerous territory. Who are you to play god? And why do you seek to destroy something that is so very similar to yourself?
I get why people generally don’t like rats. They’re gross and eat trash and have those long oily tails and they were partially responsible for the plague. I know that they are not the most beautiful creatures in God’s choir. I understand that the sight of a rat scampering out of the nearest dumpster with a mouth full of half-eaten Lou Malnati’s pizza can be shocking, maybe even frightening, but I could never imagine how it could inspire such malice.
Rats are very humanlike creatures, more so than many of the animals we as humans call pets. The ability to not only survive but thrive in an environment as inhospitable to other animals as a metropolitan city is a feat that even many humans have trouble with. In many ways, the rats are better suited to living in this environment than we are, they know not only the aboveground walkways but also the underground tunnels and sewers below, and that’s not even mentioning the rats that most likely live within the very walls you call home. They have no qualms about where their food comes from and are adept at procuring it. Perhaps the hatred of rats comes from a deeper place than just abject disgust, maybe the reason the cosmopolitan elites populating the very city I live in and cities all over the world don’t like rats is that they see a part of themselves within them, a part they wish they could unsee.
The rat is the shadow in all of us, the repressed part of ourselves that we push down with all of our might in fear that if it comes out, our lives as we know it, everything we’ve spent so long building up, will come tumbling down. While we eat and drink and socialize in the daytime, the rat sneaks out at night to devour all that we’ve left behind. While we build ourselves skyscrapers that reach up and up toward the sky, the rat fills in the cracks below, building cities underground out of the detritus we have no use for. The rat is Newton’s third law, nature’s equal but opposite reaction to the metropolitan city goer. If you were to strip away the trappings of the ego that “make” us human, took away the fear and the cares and the petty grievances, then the rat inside us all would be laid bare. The rat is us without inhibitions, driven only by a need to survive in a world that day by day grows more inhospitable. We fear that rat not because we think it’s us, but because we know it is, and we know it’s better.
It’s that peculiar mixture of envy, desire, weakness, and thus hatred of the rat that makes us seek to destroy it. Deep down we wish we were the rat, we wish we could strip naked, cover ourselves in filth, and scamper around the city streets in the hope that we may harness some of the power that the rat has. But we can’t, and we know we can’t, so we destroy what we wish we could have. Deep down we know the rat is stronger than us, we know that they know what they’re doing better than we do, and that if one day the rats rise in revolt against us we’d be powerless to stop them. Maybe a part of ourselves wishes that the rats would rise up if only to acknowledge us at all, because we know that even if we see the rat in the dumpster, the rat will never see us back. But we know we’re inferior, and we know we probably always will be, so we destroy them before they can even start thinking about destroying us. There’s nothing more human than destruction, even if it means destroying ourselves in the process.
I don’t mean to say that I think the rats should run the city, though I have no doubt they’d do a good job of it. What I mean to say is that the rats of any big city are part of the city’s ecosystem, generations and generations of them have lived, died, and flourished in the metropolitan environment, it’s the only home they know. To exterminate the rat population of a major city would be to destroy a part of that city’s essence, because, whether you like it or not, it’s as much the rats’ city as it is ours. So I’m sorry if your city-dwelling Siberian Husky contracted leptospirosis from drinking out of a puddle contaminated with rat urine, but the rats were here before your dog was, and I can assure you they’ll be here long after.
I learned early on the benign nature of the rat when I was gifted one myself as a pet. Her name was Ella and she was a gentle soul who was kind enough to share her yogurt treats with me whenever I wanted one, which was quite often. I like to think I gave Ella a happy and healthy life inside her cage in my childhood bedroom, a simple life, perhaps, but a happy life nonetheless. Whenever I tell people I used to have a rat as a pet they usually tend to stick up their noses at me and claim that they would never have such a beast as a pet, as if they aren’t waging war against science and nature itself on a quest to get their hands on made-up animals like French Bulldogs and Labradoodles. Perhaps refusing to see the beauty in the abject is another folly of ours.
Oh Ella…
beautiful post. rats are divine little trash angels and we should give them more respect.