Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat

In this entrancing report, Daily Telegraph columnist Shute (Forecast) considers humanity’s complex relationship with rats. In Paris, Shute reports on a public health project mapping the city’s rodent population, which found “the distribution of rats is... very patchy and tightly associated with human activity,” with few living in parks because of the presence of such predators as herons and foxes. Rats often serve as scapegoats for human failings, Shute contends, suggesting that Alberta, Canada’s pride over having successfully eliminated the rodents distracts from the ways in which the province’s oilfields and syringe-littered parks sustain the “environmental destruction... and municipal decay” that killing rats was supposed to solve. Elsewhere, Shute discusses how Britain’s National Fancy Rat Society seeks to improve the rodent’s reputation by hosting Westminster-esque rat shows, and how a Tanzania-based charity has successfully employed rats to sniff out land mines and identify tuberculosis in saliva samples. The trivia surprises (rat incisors grow continuously, so the animals have to constantly gnaw on things or risk their teeth fatally extending upward into their skull), and Shute emphasizes rats’ unheralded capacity for empathy and loyalty in an oddly moving account of how one of his pet rats brought scraps of food to her ailing companion and laid “immobilised by grief” for days after the other rat’s death. This will change how readers see the much-maligned animals. (June)