Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for rats!
Rats have always had a bad press. When, around 60 years ago, our pet cat gifted my mother a dead rat and expected to be praised for his hunting skills, mum lost it completely, freaking out in a way that I never witnessed at any other point in her life. And when, in the 1932 film Taxi, James Cagney famously addressed Buck Gerrard as “you dirty yellow-bellied rat”, it was not a term of endearment! No one, it seems, thinks highly of rats.
This branch is just a metre above a bird table. Within seconds of this photo being taken, the rat was down and snacking enthusiastically.
Just why is it that rats are so widely loathed and feared? Their perceived connection with disease has a lot to do with it. Rats have long been associated with plague, their fleas being held responsible for the spread of the Black Death that wiped out one third of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century. Except it’s not true, as recent research has shown. The Black Death was mostly spread by human lice and fleas. So if any species deserves to be loathed and feared because of the ravages of the plague, it is presumably us and not the poor old rat!
Rats are also associated with filth – witness Cagney’s reference to a dirty rat. Wrong again! The rat is by instinct a clean critter, and will immediately start to groom itself if its fur gets dirty. Of course, some of the places in which rats hang out are themselves dirty – sewers, rubbish dumps and so on. But hey, we’ve all got to live somewhere, and at least – just like cats – rats work hard to keep themselves clean.
The James Cagney quote also implies that rats are mean, callous animals. But this too is a misconception: research has shown that rats demonstrate emotional intelligence, and are strongly supportive of one another within their social groups.
Historically, rats have also been feared for the threat they pose to human food stocks, particularly grain stores. In the famous German folk-tale, the Pied Piper of Hamelin was hired to deal with just this problem. It is a conflict of interests that is probably less of an issue today thanks to modern bio-secure storage systems, although admittedly that may well not be true in the developing world.
And if rats move on from our grain stores to dine out instead on the take-away food that our species carelessly throws away in the streets, so be it. The solution is simple: don’t buy what you can’t eat, but if you get this wrong then at least dispose of your unwanted fries or burger or kebab somewhere that wandering rats can’t get at it. Scavenging behaviour amongst rats is for them a matter of survival; thoughtless littering by members of our own species is simply a matter of lazy selfishness.
With human food stores no longer available to them, some rats now turn to bird food. The only rats I ever see are grazing on or around bird tables and feeders, nibbling enthusiastically upon the food people have left out for their avian friends. Mrs P’s photos clearly illustrate this behaviour. It upsets some birders, but I regard it as a privilege to be able briefly study an animal that is otherwise largely hidden from me. The rats don’t hang around for long, and the birds are soon back. Everyone’s a winner.
Away from the bird table it is true that rats can be a threat to birds, disturbing nests, driving away parent birds and predating eggs and chicks. The problem is most serious on islands with no history of rodents. On such islands, if rats arrive and become established – normally thanks to the folly of humankind – the effect on seabird colonies can be devastating. In such circumstances the only way to save the birds is to eradicate the rats, a project that is lengthy, laborious and expensive. It can be done, however, as was demonstrated when invasive rats – which had arrived as stowaways on ships – were finally eradicated from Lundy, a small island off the Devon coast in the south of England.
Although their effect on bird colonies cannot be denied, rats can also be beneficial to wildlife. The African Giant Pouched Rat, which is native to the savannahs of southern Africa, can be trained to assist in the prevention of wildlife crime by using its acute sense of smell to detect smuggled ivory, rhino horn and pangolin scales. Cheaper to train than sniffer dogs, and able to operate in spaces that are inaccessible to canines, these so-called “hero rats” are an important new weapon in the war for wildlife. They have also been used elsewhere in other innovative ways, including the detection of landmines and tuberculosis pathogens.
Rats are intelligent animals, more complex than they appear at first glance. They will always be controversial. I hate the devastation they cause in some island seabirds colonies, and accept that their presence in our well-ordered 21st century lives may sometimes be unsettling. But the rats are only doing what comes naturally for them, and from an evolutionary perspective they are doing it rather well. Overall, I would suggest, they are not nearly as bad as popular culture and urban myth would have us believe. And so, ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for rats!
Now I'm 64 