You step out of a bright yellow taxi cab onto a busy sidewalk. Someone a few cars back honks their horn impatiently as you hurriedly pay the driver and make your way down the street, shaded by the height of towering skyscrapers that block out the sunlight, casting countless pedestrians and an endless stream of cars in eternal dimness punctuated only by the overly bright artificial lights of signs and billboards. You join the din of people hurrying this way and that, waiting to cross a busy intersection. As the crosswalk signal flashes, you continue on your way, glancing at a billboard to your right, cycling through advertisements for Broadway musicals. This place seems completely overrun by humans and their manmade things, a concrete jungle forged into what was once a small sheltered finger of undisturbed land. But if you pause, even for a moment, step out of the commotion and have a look around, you’ll pretty quickly realize that the humans are not alone here. They share this city with another, just as prolific species - rats. Though not always apparent amidst the distracting hustle and bustle, rats are everywhere. There are three in that trash can. Six are eyeing you from the sewer drain. One just scurried down that side alley. Thousands more scamper through the subway tunnel that runs just beneath your feet. Rats often get a bad rap, and there’s good reason for that, but, did you know, they are far more significant, intelligent, and, dare I say sophisticated than we give them credit for? Let’s fix that.   

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This week we’re talking about rats which may seem weird and random but I think you’ll be surprised to learn just how much rats have shaped our collective world history and possibly our collective world future. Plus there are a lot of misconceptions about rats so we gotta fix that. Quick confession, I once owned two pet rats. Yeah. I actually bought them for my little sister when she was like 10 because she’s 10 years younger than I am. So she obviously still lived at home with my parents and I had moved out. So I bought them for her, these two domesticated rats. They were white with brownish gray spots on them, both girls named Dot and Dash. Bought them from the local pet shop and was, like, “here ya go, got ya some rats.” And I think she was into it but my mom pretty quickly shut it down. She was like “Oh, cool, you have pet rats now, cause we’re not doing that at my house.” And now that I’m a mom I totally get it, like what was I thinking my 10 year old sister was actually going to take care of the rats herself? No that responsibility would have fallen squarely upon my mother which is why she ultimately shut it down. 

 

Now, for some context here though, this wasn’t like totally crazy of me. We had a lot of weird pets growing up. Always had a dog or two at a time, at least a couple cats, hamsters, hermit crabs, we had a cockatiel once that my older sister found in the middle of a country road driving home from college. He was cool. He could talk and whistle the Andy Griffith theme some. We’ve had way too many chickens, we rescued baby squirrels and lots of baby birds to rehabilitate. My mom has a sign hanging in her dining room that says “Welcome to the Zoo.” Which is our little joke because we know it’s kind of ridiculous but we’re animal people. So I didn’t think this was that crazy. I kept reading about how rats actually make really good pets because they don’t need much space, they’re social and super smart, you can train them to do tricks and follow commands and stuff. I don’t know. I thought I was onto something here. 

But I ended up with these rats at a time in my life when I was kind of bouncing around between different temporary living situations with randomish roommates. I was in my early twenties. And at one point I was living in a house with like 4 other people and they basically staged an intervention and were like “yeah the rats have to go. They’re super gross and creepy.” At which point I was like, “Oh yeah I forgot people don’t like rats,” because they obviously didn’t bother me at all. So I was like “Hey mom, my roommates say I have to get rid of my rats can they…” and she was like “nope.” So I actually gave them away to some lady on Craigslist under the condition that they would be kept as pets and not fed to a snake or something. I actually put that in the ad. I was like you can have this $100 cage I just bought and all the food and stuff for free just please promise you won’t do anything bad to them. So, I don’t know, lesson learned. I definitely didn’t realize how hard most people hate rats. But the more I’ve researched them for this episode, the more I feel like that hatred is actually a little unfounded and mostly based on inaccurate information. So let’s set the record straight for the rats. 

 

The main species of rat that is literally everywhere. Like, I know my intro was set in New York City, if you didn’t catch that, and there are obviously rats in big cities like that but, you guys, they are freaking everywhere. There is probably a rat way closer to you right now than you realize. The main species that we see is the brown rat which is actually called rattus norvegicus. That name makes it sound like the brown rat came from Norway. But it didn’t, like at all. It’s completely misnamed. They actually came from Asia. According to an article called “How Rats Took Over the World” by Zafrir Rinat, a genetic study was done on the brown rat back in 2017 that revealed exactly when and how they spread from Asia to everywhere on Earth except for Antarctica. Rats are one of the top three most prolific mammalian colonizers on Earth. That list includes humans, mice, and rats. Everywhere that there are humans, there are rats, and also mice. And the vast majority of those rats are brown rats. 

 

But that wasn’t always the case. According to the rat genome sequencing done as part of this study, brown rats originated in Southeast Asia and spread to Northeast Asia around 200,000 years ago. At this point, they were living in grassy fields near streams. They were digging burrows and eating whatever they could find. But then, around 11,000 years ago, humans in these areas of Asia switched from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to agriculture - growing and storing grain. The brown rats in the area pretty quickly realized that, if they set up camp near these humans and their massive food stores, they would have an endless supply of free, easily accessible food. So that’s what they did. They moved in with humans and started eating our food and sleeping in our warm places. I mean wouldn’t you if you were a rat? It’s the same thing cats did except they kind of offered us something in return in the form of killing rats and mice so we let it ride. Both rats and cats basically domesticated themselves. 

 

So brown rats just chilled in Asia for a very long time until around 3,600 years ago when they made their way to the Middle East. Trade became a thing so their hitching rides with these trade caravans and hopping on ships to the Middle East. By 2,600 years ago they were in Africa. Then by around the middle ages they had made their way to Europe. And from there, well we all know what Europe was up to starting around the year 1500. At that point maritime trade and colonization exploded and anywhere the humans were going in their ships packed to the brim with barrels full of food, the rats were going too and so they made their way to the Americas. 

 

These brown rats were an invasive species. Because, there were other rat species living in some of these places before they arrived. In Europe it was the black rat AKA rattus rattus. Which is just the silliest name. I mean come on you guys, rattus rattus? Can you give me something other than rattus here please? Black rats are smaller and more timid than brown rats, less aggressive and territorial. So when the brown rats arrived on the ships, they just flexed their rat muscles and the black rats scurried off. They’re more likely to flee than fight. And the brown rats are fighters. They don’t back down. So they were able to take over that way. But let’s talk about black rats. I hope I’m not losing you guys here. Black rats are significant though because they are often blamed for the spread of the bubonic plague AKA the black death throughout Europe especially during the 1300s and this is a big deal historically.

 

Black rats were the rat of Europe until around the 18th century when brown rats pretty much fully took over. According to a study led by the University of York, which analyzed DNA from black rat remains found at archaeological sites throughout Europe - I think I’ve missed my calling by the way. I think I was supposed to be a rat archaeologist - but according to this study, black rats colonized Europe on two separate occasions. First, during the expansion of the Roman Empire north into Europe which would have been happening mostly between like 200 BC and 14 AD. Then, the population kind of dies off and they’re not really sure why. They’re theorizing it could have been due to, basically the fall of Rome, climate change, or some plague that affected rats. What they do know from the study is that the black rat colonized Europe again, a totally different wave of black rats during the medieval period. 

 

According to David Orton from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York in an article called “Spread of black rats was linked to human historical events” quote “We’ve long known that the spread of rats is linked to human events, and we suspected that Roman expansion brought them north into Europe. But one remarkable result of our study is quite how much of a single event this seems to have been: all of our Roman rat bones from England to Serbia form a single group in genetic terms. When rats reappear in the Medieval period we see a completely different genetic signature – but again all of our samples from England to Hungary to Finland all group together. We couldn’t have hoped for clearer evidence of repeated colonization of Europe.” end quote. 

 

So the reason black rats in Europe are significant, before they were booted out by the brown rat, is of course because of the ways they’ve been linked to the bubonic plague. And I think this is really the underlying reason why most of the western world despises rats, because of their association with spreading disease. But I also think it’s based on slightly false information. 

 

The bubonic plague is an illness caused by a bacteria called Yersinia Pestis. According to LiveScience, this bacteria maintains a long term presence in rodent populations and, more specifically, the fleas that live on those rodents. So plagues like bubonic plague start with rodents and often spill over into humans. So it’s easy to say that rats were responsible for the plague that absolutely decimated Europe, most notably the second wave that occurred between 1347 and 1351, claiming an estimated 25 million lives which was roughly a third of the population at that time. However, recent studies, kind of disprove this theory and point the finger of blame instead to fleas and lice on humans and not rats as the real culprit. 

 

So, okay, to be clear, the plague contaminated fleas probably came from the rats originally but there’s no way the rats could have spread the disease as quickly as it spread. It was the humans, the dirty, nasty humans who never bathed, that spread the plague to each other. As reported in a BBC article by Victoria Gill, Professor Nils Stenseth from the University of Oslo and his team simulated outbreaks of the plague in nine European cities to create three different models. Model number one - if the plague was spread by rats. Model number two - if it was spread by airborne transmission. And number three - if it was spread by fleas and lice that lived on humans and their clothing. Stenseth says quote “The conclusion was very clear. The lice model fits best. It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats. It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats rather than being spread from person to person.” end quote. 

 

So rats really were unfairly blamed for the devastation of the black death throughout Europe. Modern studies show they couldn’t possibly be responsible for the rate at which that sucker spread. But for this they got a reputation as dirty, nasty, gross, disease ridden. When in reality, it was the humans who were dirty, nasty, gross, and disease ridden. Rats actually groom themselves and others meticulously. They are constantly cleaning themselves. More recently, the news broke that rats in New York City were carrying various strains of Covid and people freaked out about that. But once again, are you more likely to get Covid from a rat or from your neighbor? Probably your neighbor. Rats can spread it, I guess, but it’s just not as much of a threat as like any human spreading it to you which is way more likely. 

 

Now I’m not trying to say that rats can’t spread disease, they can. And some of them are deadly. One bad one in particular is hantavirus, but they can also carry salmonella, rat bite fever, and of course bubonic plague but that’s not such a big deal anymore now that we have antibiotics. So yes they can carry diseases, but so can cats. You can’t get near a cat litter box while pregnant for fear of giving your baby toxoplasmosis and cat scratch fever is a real thing, my friend had it. But cat’s aren’t seen as dirty and gross. And you know who spreads way more diseases to humans than rats or cats? Other humans. Yeah. 

 

But you know, that view of rats as dirty and gross invaders of our space is really just a western one. Eastern countries see rats totally different. In India they are highly revered. And honestly, bubonic plague aside, there’s a lot to revere you guys. They are highly intelligent, they live in colonies with complex social hierarchies, they form deep bonds and relationships with other rats sometimes risking their own lives to save family and friends, They can learn and recognize human words, they laugh. They are weirdly similar to humans socially and psychologically. So in India, they acknowledge this. There is a rat temple in the North West Indian city of Deshnoke that is dedicated to the rat goddess Karni Mata. And it’s just a temple full of rats. Just rats scurrying everywhere, over 20,000 of them. It’s wild. The temple attendants put out bowls of milk and grain for them. And people journey to this temple to eat with the rats. Yes. They sit on the floor in the temple and they eat and drink from the same bowls as the rats and this is taking it too far even for me. But they believe that food touched by the rats is touched by God. They worship the rats, basically because they believe that the rats will be reincarnated as Sadhus which are Hindi holy men, after they die. 

 

But it’s not just India. The rat is the first animal of the Chinese zodiac. If you were born in 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008, or 2020 you were born in the year of the rat. The story goes that the twelve animals stood on the banks of a river arguing over who should lead the cycle of the years. And so they had a contest to see who could reach the other side of the river first. They all jumped into the river. The ox was the fastest and he’s coming up on the opposite bank in first place but he didn’t realize that the rat was traveling on his back. The rat jumps off at the last second and wins the race becoming the first animal in the cycle. And isn’t that just so fitting? Hitching a ride on the back of the ox? That’s basically what they did in real life too. Just hitched rides all over the place. But it’s cunning too, right? It’s smart. It’s the type of wittiness the Western world usually gives to foxes in our fables and folktales. The Chinese gave it to the rat because they really are that smart. So if you were born in the year of the rat, you’re supposed to be smart, quick-witted, flexible, adaptable, and outgoing.

 

Japan also sees value in rats. There they are a symbol of the god of luck and prosperity, Daikoku. One source stated that the Japanese leave rice cakes out as an offering to the rats at New Years although I’m not sure about that. I mean maybe they used to do that, I don’t know. In trying to cross reference that, I just kept coming across news articles about how, since Covid, Japan is completely overrun with rats and it's a major problem. So I can’t imagine that they are still intentionally feeding these guys as some kind of superstitious omen of good luck. 

 

Ancient Rome also had superstitions about rats. Although, they considered rats and mice to be the same animal. They just called them big mouse and little mouse. But seeing a white one was supposed to be good luck and a black one was bad luck which is unfortunate considering the black rat was like the rat of ancient Rome. They must have had a lot of bad luck. I mean their entire empire collapsed launching the world into the dark ages so yeah that’s about as bad as luck gets. 

 

The ancient Egyptians don’t appear to have been big fans of rats. They don’t have a rat god which is some indication also they were super fans of cats in Egypt and part of the reason why they were so into their cats is probably because the cats helped control the rat and mice population. So that sort of suggests that rats were seen as pests in Egypt. 

 

Now, let’s go to Victorian England. So we’re talking about the second half of the 1800s. The rat situation in Great Britain in the latter half of the 19th century got weird. It got real weird. First of all, rats were a major problem. By this point, the brown rat had completely overtaken the black rat and also just the entire city of London. They were everywhere and the Brits were not feeling it. So a whole industry of rat killing sprang up. Because, I mean okay, picture Queen Victoria in fancy lace ball gowns hosting fancy parties in her palace and inviting the elite of the world. And then imagine that during one of these parties just as they’re cutting into an ornately decorated five tiered cake, a rat scurries across the table. Because rats didn’t care that you were the queen of England or that you were hosting a fancy party. They were everywhere, and that included in your palace. Yes, even Queen Victoria had a rat problem and she hired the best in the business to get rid of them. Jack Black. No not the comedic actor star of School of Rock and Tenacious D front man. Although, sidenote, did you know his mom worked as an aerospace engineer for NASA? She was actually responsible for helping design a system that helped save the Apollo 13 astronauts refer back to episode 25 for more on that. Not more on Jack Black’s mom, more on the Apollo 13 situation. Okay, but this is a totally different Jack Black. This Jack Black is a rat catcher. He is like the rat catcher of Victorian England, ratcatcher to her Majesty. 

 

According to an an article in Laphram’s Quarterly by Adee Braun called “Her Majesty’s Rat-Catcher,” quote “Black was an enterprising Dr. Doolittle meets the Pied Piper with an aptitude for animal breeding, catching, and killing, as well as an eye for business. He became a minor celebrity of Victorian London’s streets for his rat handling theatrics.” end quote. So, he’s not just catching rats, he’s making a show out of it, turning it into entertainment. Black is quoted in “London Labour and the London Poor,” an account of London street life by a contemporary journalist named Henry Mayhew saying quote “I’ve been bitten nearly everywhere, even where I can’t name to you, sir. I once had the teeth of a rat…” I don’t know why I’m doing a southern accent. He just seems like someone that would be from like Mississippi or something. But he wasn’t. He was from London. “I’ve been bitten nearly everywhere, even where I can’t name to you, sir.” Sorry that was awful, I’ll stop. “I once had the teeth of a ratbreak in my finger. [It] was dreadful bad, and swole, and putrified, so that I had to have the broken bits pulled out with tweezers.” So, you may be wondering, why is he catching these rats with his hands instead of just like rat poison? Well, he didn’t actually want to kill the rats, just catch and remove them. And that’s because, well, first of all it’s way more theatrical to catch a rat with your bare hands, but also he wanted them alive because he had a whole nother business of selling live rats. 

 

Okay, so we have most Londoners wanting the rats gone and hiring rat catchers to get rid of them. Then we have another group of Londoners that buys rats from rat catchers for a fun new sport they call rat baiting. This typically went down in the basements of taverns. They would unleash a bunch of rats and then they would unleash a dog to kill the rats. They would place bets on things like how long it would take the dog to kill the rats, how many rats the dog would kill. Rat baiting became so popular that the government actually put a tax specifically on rat killing dogs. Like, Oh you want a rat terrier? That’s gonna cost ya.” 

 

So Jack Black sold rats to these pubs for rat baiting. But he also sold them to a completely opposite consumer. As he’s catching all these rats, he’s noticing that some of them are not just the boring old dusty brown color of a common sewer rat. Some have interesting colors and patterns, white, yellowish, spotted. He starts keeping these interesting looking rats and breeding them to sell as pets. They’re referred to as “fancy rats.” This is what Dot and Dash were, they were fancy rats. But there is literally no difference between fancy rats and sewer rats. They are just the pretty sewer rats set aside because of the color of their fur or whatever. So Jack Black sells the ugly boring plain rats to the pubs for rat baiting and he keeps the pretty ones and breeds them to sell as fancy rats. So there are well to do Victorian aristocrats carrying these fancy pet rats around in cages while hiring rat catchers to get rid of the ugly ones that live in their walls. If that is not just, like, why are we the way that we are? Humans are so weird. 

 

According to Braun quote “It is unclear exactly how many rats ran rampant in London in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was estimated that a single effective rat-killer of the time killed about 8,000 rats a year, and there was certainly no shortage of rats to keep them busy.” end quote. And, while that seems like a lot of rats, they haven’t gone anywhere. There are still a crazy number of rats, especially in big cities. If you have not seen the documentary called “Rats” by director Morgan Spurlock, umm you have to. It changed my life. It is one of the single most profound documentaries I’ve ever seen. I’m not kidding. It’s mind blowing. But it talks about how adaptable rats are, 10 times more adaptable than humans. And how they are becoming resistant to rat poison. And how their populations are just continuing to absolutely explode under the radar. Like, you guys, rats are taking over the world. I think they are more successful as a species than we are and, we’re reaching a point where they are honestly outsmarting us to an extent. 

 

During Covid there were a lot of unexpected rat problems. As humans retreated out of public places, rats just absolutely took over. They also became more aggressive and territorial towards the humans who did dare wander into those areas. Like, not running away. Like, standing their ground going “yeah buddy, you abandoned this pizza restaurant. It’s officially ours now. Back off.” That’s my rat impersonation apparently. For real though there are just tons of Covid era newspaper articles about rats, specifically towards the end of Covid when people were leaving their houses again and trying to go back out into the world - “Rats Take Over a San Francisco Playground,” “Rats taking over a Punta Gorda Walgreens,” “Brazen rats take over NYC apartments” “Cannibal rats taking over during Coronavirus pandemic.” These are newspaper headlines. The Walgreens. I don’t know why that one’s so funny to me. But yeah, it’s a problem and it’s only getting bigger. For real you guys, watch the Rats documentary, I need you to understand the gravity of this situation. 

 

But also, don’t start hating rats because of all that. I mean I understand that it’s necessary to remove them from our living spaces for lots of reasons. But rats are also actually quite useful to society. They are very intelligent and weirdly similar to humans in the ways that they respond psychologically to scenarios. Also, almost all human genes associated with disease have genetic counterparts in rats. So that plus the fact that they’re considered vermin and aren’t protected in any way. You can kill as many rats as you want without consequences, hence my Craigslist plea on behalf of Dot and Dash. That makes rats very useful for scientific and medical research - lab rats. According to the University of Cambridge quote “The laboratory rat has made invaluable contributions to cardiovascular medicine, neural regeneration, wound healing, diabetes, transplantation, behavioral studies and space motion sickness research. Rats have also been widely used to test drug efficacy and safety.” end quote. 

 

In the 1960s, rats were used to conduct a very interesting psychological study on the effects of overpopulation. By the 60s, people had started to become very concerned about overpopulation. The world population had hit 3 billion, doubled in the last 60 years alone. And that’s because of a lot of factors - improvements in medicine, antibiotics, better nutrition, more economic stability because of the industrial revolution. That was kind of terrifying though, to see it explode at that rate, double, triple. Now we’re hovering just below 8 billion people. It’s, phew. They were worried about 3 billion. But they did. They were worried about the exponential growth of human population because they didn’t know what would happen if and when it became unsustainable. 

 

So a scientist from Maryland named John B. Calhoun decided to conduct some research using rats to model an overpopulation scenario and see how the rats responded. He figured, rats are similar enough to humans psychologically, so humans would probably respond in a similar fashion. So what he did was, he partitioned a room into four equal parts - pens that were separated by electrified barriers so the rats were stuck in their respective pens. He puts a certain number of rats in each of the 4 pens. I think it was like 2 pairs of rats in each pen. He provides ample food and water. There’s bedding to make nests. He creates a rat utopia in each of the pens. What he does not provide, though, is more space for the rats as they start to reproduce and the population in each pen goes up. He lets this experiment go on and he observes their behavior. What he finds is, the rats do not spread out evenly to fill all available space in the pen. They kind of all corral together in certain areas. Dominant male rats take control of entire pens and become very aggressive. Calhoun calls these rats “kingpins” and “aristocrats.” They start attacking females, juvenile rats, and less dominant males. They start biting each other’s tails, which is significant, I guess, because it isn’t typical rat behavior. One group of rats becomes withdrawn. They stop interacting with other rats. They just kind of shut down. Calhoun calls them “dropouts.” Other rats that Calhoun refers to as “the beautiful ones” start grooming themselves excessively. The females stop building nests. Infant mortality shoots up to 96%. They aren’t being fed, they aren’t being protected. Adults start cannibalizing the baby rats. It’s horrific, what Calhoun reports. And all of this just because of lack of space. They still have food and water and everything they need provided for them. They are just crowded, overpopulated. 

 

Calhoun publishes his horrifying findings in an essay called “Population Density and Social Pathology,” summing it with quote “when a population of laboratory rats is allowed to increase in a confined space, the rats develop acute abnormal patterns of behavior that can even lead to the extinction of the population.” end quote. And he coins the phrase “behavioral sink” to explain this phenomenon, basically an evolutionary “self-destruct” button to keep a species from overpopulating its habitat. And of course people freaked out at this discovery. They are more worried than ever about overpopulation. Are humans doomed to this same dystopian fate? This behavioral sink? Is there anything we can do about it?

 

Well, Calhoun started to think that maybe there was something we could do about it. He started to doubt his own conclusions, really. He started to think, you know, maybe it wasn’t an overpopulation problem. Maybe it was a design problem, a problem with the way the environment was set up. The way the rats didn’t make use of the whole space, the way they were drawn to these crowded areas, social creatures, just like humans, unwilling to separate from the crowd even when it became violent and dangerous - I find that interesting. They needed the social interaction and the only way to get it was to go near the other rats and most likely get attacked. Calhoun started to think that, maybe if he designed the scenario differently, it could support that kind of population without triggering the behavioral sink. 

 

He started working on testing this towards the end of his career. According to a Washington Post article by Frederick Kunkle called “The researcher who loved rats and fueled our doomsday fears” quote “just as Calhoun had altered the animals’ behavior by tinkering with the colony’s physical design, he believed that humans could counter the effects of overcrowding by modifying their environment. Through technology and culture, people could enlarge the “conceptual space” that allows them to live in peace among a multitude. By the late 20th century, he prophesied, the world would be knit together into a single network, and scientists would have unprecedented means to collaborate, perhaps using interconnected computers to form a “World Brain.” New concepts and smarter design would not only allow people to live in proximity but to thrive.” end quote. The internet. Calhoun prophesied the internet as a way for humans to maintain social contact with others but also spread out and not all group together in tight areas where violence might break out. 

 

The internet is the answer to the behavioral sink problem. And we’re seeing it more and more since Covid. People leaving big cities, working remotely from rural areas. I live in a very remote area and, since Covid really, there’s been an influx of people buying houses here, moving here full time from big northern cities because they work from home now. They don’t have to crowd into busy high rise office buildings in bustling cities. They can work from their peaceful, remote beach houses and still fulfill their need, somewhat at least, for social interaction and human contact. And I feel like some people think that’s a bad thing, like humans are becoming more and more isolated. God forbid a machine check you out at the local Walmart. The boomers love to complain about this. We absolutely must interact with a downtrodden 16 year old who hates every second of this god forsaken job. We must continue to hire humans to do things machines can actually do better. Um, maybe not. Maybe we’re actually on the right track here in avoiding the behavioral sink. Something to think about. 

 

I see a weird contradiction with rats. We don’t want them anywhere near us. We want to get rid of all the rats. But at the same time, we kind of need them. But we just want them in fancy cages, or I mean, some people do, and in our science labs. We don’t want them anywhere we can’t control them. It’s like a control issue with rats. I think they make us feel powerless. They challenge us as a species and we are not used to that. We are the undefeated apex of the animal kingdom. So to think that there’s an animal we can’t control, that actually kind of controls us. That’s not good for humans. But we have something they don’t have, a way to avoid the seemingly inevitable dystopian plummet of the behavioral sink. We have our innovation, our technology, our virtual social networks. You’re listening to me right now with however many other people from, potentially thousands of miles away. History Fix listeners don’t have to corral into an auditorium somewhere. I wouldn’t be doing this if we did, by the way. That is the answer to behavioral sink. However, I guarantee you, that wherever you are listening from, you and you and you and you, and even me, there is a rat lingering just out of sight because rats are everywhere and they deserve a little recognition for that. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix. I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow this podcast on whatever app you’re using to listen, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from the Smithsonian Institute, the Washington Post, USA Today, Rocky Pest Control, Earth Guard Pest Control, BBC, Haaretz, Max-Plank-Gesellschaft, Laphram’s Quarterly, the University of Cambridge, and NPR. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.