The compost heap in summer is one of my richest sources of satisfaction. July heat infuses the pile of veg peels, garden weeds and cardboard. It steams and crackles, a cacophony of digestion. Billions of tiny lives (my own included) heaving and panting leaving an improbable trail of sweet, crisp black.
A few weeks ago, shirt off, glasses dripping off my nose, fork plunged deep, the pile started quivering more than anyone could expect worms alone to quiver. Moments later, ten inches of matted, greasy grey fur burst out and tore off across the garden. Rats.
I had been warned about this. No cooked food waste, no bread: my gardening comrades scolded me. Secretly though, dear reader, I had been proud of our un-fussy compost heap. I scoffed at their caution. We had something special going, our exceptional pile guzzled whatever was offered. Now -shock at the rat fading- I felt like a child who’d hurt themselves doing something he’d been told not to.
The main problem with having rats in your compost is that they will pee and poo pathogens all over the stuff you are using to grow vegetables. Experts call them ‘germ elevators’ because, in cities, they pull diseases from the sewage systems back up to the surface and into buildings. Some estimate that ⅓ of the world’s food supply is destroyed by rats contaminating crops and stored foods. And they are experts at getting out of hand. One rat couple can have 15,000 descendants. And the climate crisis is making winters, which usually keep rats in check, shorter.
With the mum gone, I carefully peered into the pile. A writhing nest of squinting eyes and pink bellies. I wasn’t sure what the appropriate response was. It occurred to me that I might have some adult responsibility here. The RSPCA website chilled me out. Rats are neophobes, wary of change. Having now been disturbed, the rat family would most likely leave of their own accord. So I covered them up and went to drink some water.
The lives of rats and modern humans are inseparable. While the idea that we are never more than 6ft away from one of these rodents is a myth, rats are ‘commensal’ with humans. They only live where we live, and they live everywhere we live. The ‘Norway rat’, Rattus norvegicus, so called because it was believed to have arrived in Britain from Norway in the 1800s, has followed international trade routes so thoroughly that it has established itself on every continent except Antarctica.
Rats carry disease, gnaw through infrastructure and destroy ecosystems. They are also highly social, living in underground colonies of up to 150 individuals. They’re furtive, so we don’t know much about how they live together, but we do know that they groom one another, cuddle together for warmth and share food. They display a wide range of facial expressions and can interpret and react to the emotional states of other rats. Adolescents play fight and emit high-pitched squeaks indicating positive emotions: laughter.
The most common way humans kill these creatures is with ‘rodenticides’. These are a form of anticoagulant, which inhibit blood clotting in the rat over a period of around 4-8 days. It is their slowness that makes them effective. Their distrust of novelty means they don’t immediately consume an unfamiliar food source, instead watching to see how it affects other rats. The delayed effect of rodenticides bypasses this environmental intelligence. A rat might even feed on the same rodenticide several times, while its capillaries begin to break down and its blood fails to clot.
I searched through several pages of Google results looking for how this process might feel from the rat's perspective. All I found were industry articles extolling the effectiveness of rodenticides. From a range of sources, I managed to piece together that eating rodenticides will look roughly like this: the rat will become exhausted and extremely dehydrated; they will drag their waning bodies in search of water that will not quench their thirst; two days before death, they will become paralysed, as their organs agonisingly fill with blood, until finally, they die.
But this is only one of the two main ways humans relate to rats. Strangely, when we’re not violently destroying them, we are obsessively studying them. There are over 20 million rats held for research purposes worldwide. Rats are considered a ‘model species’ for scientific research because of key biological similarities to humans. If you have been prescribed medicine recently, a rat almost certainly tried it first. Recently researchers have been giving rats little rat-sized doses of MDMA. The rats are taking part in a giant human process to get MDMA legalised for therapeutic (and pharmaceutical profit-making) purposes. But this attention should not be confused for love. It’s an ultimately narcissistic curiosity. All of this study is not to better know Rattus but to use rats to better know humans.
A few years ago, while working as a community organiser for a renters union, I was instructed to go doorknocking in a cluster of once council houses turned private rentals in central Leeds. An organiser is always looking for the seam of discontent in a community, an issue felt both deeply and widely by the people there. On those streets, everybody had the same complaint: rats. I spoke to young parents, groups of student nurses and recently arrived Eastern European immigrants who told me about finding rat nests in linen cupboards, holes in cereal boxes or of running terrified at night from packs of rodents who roamed the streets freely. I asked everybody the same question, who’s fault is this? They all gave the same answer: the Council.
For the people on those few streets, surrounded by the increasingly luxurious new developments rising out of Leeds City City Centre, to live among rats was to be forgotten. The feeling was that the council (and the wider system which the council stood for) had abandoned them. Calls or letters of complaint produced silence, false promises or condescension. People wanted a more effective waste disposal system, mass poisoning or the bulldozing of the entire place and the chance to go live somewhere else. They felt that they were entitled to something more, though when I asked how we could force the council to take action they seemed stumped. When I asked what their neighbours thought of all this, they said they didn’t know them.
This experience was a reminder that rats are the writhing shadow of the project of human civilisation. Wherever modernity claims with concrete, rats breed in the walls. But in that little bit of Leeds, where the rats seemed to dominate human life, modernity felt like it was failing. Many of the people I spoke to wondered how such a thing could happen in this country. By which they meant, how could this happen in a rich, western, so-called advanced country? One answer might be that the project of modernity, which has always been fueled by death and marginalisation, is increasingly struggling to outpace its own shadow. The excesses are coming home to nest.
Capitalism, in partnership with the state, has tended to increase human control over everything else. The land is parcelled up and made “productive”, continents are conquered and indeed, the rats which would have run riot in the expanding cities of early capitalism are pushed out of sight and out of mind. But while neoliberalism tries to exploit every last drop of profit from an exhausted system, human control is fraying round the edges. This might not be experienced by a tech worker living in one of Leed’s new luxury high rises. But for the single dad in the outskirts who is afraid to let his kid play in the street in case she gets bitten by a rat, the story of progress and control doesn’t make much sense anymore.
If that story is about the problem rats represent, this next one is about what happens when you try to fix it with the same tools that broke it. In the 19th century, a whaling boat accidentally introduced a group of rats to Campbell Island south of New Zealand. Over the next few hundred years they took over and destroyed the native ecology, which had evolved no defences to mammalian predators. A rare flightless teal and a wading duck went locally extinct. In 2002 the New Zealand government brought 120 tons of rat poison to the island in boats and helicopters. They killed 200,000 rats. It was the largest rat hunt in history.
During the project, however, a tanker carrying 18 tons of poison sank in a whale breeding ground. To this day, rat poison is found in local shellfish. Today New Zealand has committed to Predator Free 2050, a project to eliminate all invasive mammalian predators by the middle of the century.
In some ways our garden acts as a tiny refuge and lab for better biospheric relations, but we don’t have any solid answers about the rat. I’ve been turning our heap, and the rats have left. Apparently, if it’s microbially diverse, pathogens aren’t going to survive long there anyway. I’ve also read that toxic rat pee is almost certainly more present in the warehouses that store our supermarket food than it ever could be in our garden.
While there’s no sign of them, they almost certainly haven’t gone far. They are capable of burrowing intricate pathways underneath concrete. It’s possible our garden is propped up by a Grecian labyrinth of rat columns. I’m optimistic that we’ve established what Roland Barthes’ would call idiorrhythmy, “a form of community in which individuals are not constrained by others because the rhythm of their interactions allows them to keep enough distance”. Perhaps, between rats and us, an idiorrhythmic entanglement is all we can hope for. Co-existence at a distance.
On a dark, rainy day recently, I see a couple of them scampering about out the back window. The barrier of the glass allows my immediate fear and disgust to morph into something else. Not cuteness. Not awe. Something weird, and chest expanding. Astonishment maybe. An openness. Is this a middle class fancy? If they were in our house I’d have other feelings crowding whatever this is out. Curiosity and intimacy don’t always correspond to proximity. So, an experience afforded by boundaries that my old Leeds comrades are denied, but not a fundamentally ridiculous thing to think. After all, if we are to create gardens, communities and cities in which we can thrive in conjunction and co-operation with other species, we will have to reassess our relationships, not only with wildflowers and wolves but with rats.
Thank you - a really interesting and thought provoking piece of writing.
Fantastic writing, absolutely loved reading this.