Behold rat. Behold the magnificent, clever creature as it runs from the bin you have just opened or disappears into the nearest bush. Behold rat as it is cut open or drugged or injected to improve your health in the name of science, as many millions of its peers have been. Behold rat – though you may find that tricky, because the old adage that you are never more than six feet away from a rat is comprehensively skewered in this wonderful, charming book. Wonderful? Charming? Rats?
Yes. Even Joe Shute, a man scared of the creatures, bravely takes two four-inch baby rats into his house and slowly grows to love them. He acknowledges that his fear is no less powerful for it having been socially instilled in him by a society that, for ignorant reasons, demonises rats. They are considered pests and vermin; but they are also animals that laugh when tickled and block their sleeping quarters to give themselves privacy. Shute’s pets Molly and Ermintrude are as compelling as his travels around the world of rats, which take him underground, of course, and also to meet modern rat-catchers with their ‘ratter’ dogs. In Tanzania, the astonishing Apopo rats clear minefields with their vastly superior olfactory sense, and are being used to sniff out TB on slides far faster and more successfully than humans.
Stowaway is an odd title. Yes, rats do stow away. I remember the rat guards – plastic barriers slotted onto the mooring ropes on a container ship I travelled on – although I can’t now recall whether they were to prevent rats coming aboard or leaving.
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