Year of the Rat

The Year of the Rat, in the Chinese Zodiac, began on 25/26 January 2020, and runs to 11/12 February 2021. In Chinese it is 鼠年and in pinyin transliterated as shǔ​nián. 

So it is time to say something about the rat, which is to be expected in a blog about language. 

The Down Under Rat

Rats don't have much of a fan base, although there are rat fanciers in Australia. However, it is forbidden to import rats into Australia, even fancy (i.e. domesticated) rats. So there has been local breeding of fancy rats, and one outcome is the Down Under Rat (pictured), a handsome Australian breed with distinctive colouring. 

According to the Wikipedia, “fancy rats care for themselves and are affordable, even compared to other small pets; ...additionally, they are quite independent. loyal and easily trained. They are considered more intelligent that other domesticated rodents. Healthy fancy rats typically live 2 to 3 years." 

I have two small collections of rat material. One is my collection of rat images. Both are from Paris. One was issued by the Mairie (local council) of the 15^th arrondissement of Paris (a pleasant residential area located in the south-west of Paris between the Tour Montparnasse and the Seine River) as part of its campaign against rats. 

The other was issued as part of a campaign against the “massacre” of rats by the 15^th arrondissement. Zoopolis.fr (Paris Animaux Zoopolis) called for an end to the poisoning of rats. Their campaign in the forthcoming mayoral elections includes a manifesto. Four candidates including the current mayor, Anne Hidalgo, have indicated agreement with all of the manifesto. 

I have also a small collection of three books about rats. Brian Plummer’s Tales of a rat-hunting man (1978) is the story of a man who has been involved with rats since he was 8 anyway. Plummer (1936-2003) was a Welsh dog breeder and ferret enthusiast, among other things, and wrote over 35 books about terriers and ferrets. His interest in rats was in killing them, using a three-species team (Brian, terriers and ferrets) 

The second book, The Rat: a world menace (1929) by Alfred Moore Hogarth, (1876-?) is a serious treatise on the rat. Moore Hogarth was an expert on pests, and a member of the College of Pestology. He was instrumental in putting forward a Bill for Rat Destruction to Parliament in 1908, and was involved in the first Conference Internationale du Rat (1928). He was an implacable campaigner against rats, and his interest in them was eradication. 

Most recently, I’ve read The Enchantment of the long-haired rat: a rodent history of Australia, by Tim Bonyhady (2019). This is the engaging story of a single species – not the common foreign mammal species rattus rattus or rattus norvegicus, with which we are familiar, but Australia’s own rattus villosissimus. This is a distinct species of rat, native to Australia. Bonyhady’s fascinating book, published by Text, is a tribute to the long-haired rat, or Mayaroo in the language of the Diyari people of Lake Eyre, for whom it is a totem. Along with the Polynesian rat, rattus exulans, the mayaroo is an example of the migration of this family of rodents to remote parts of the world, preceding or accompanying homo sapiens. 

Naaman Zhou in the Guardian and Nancy Cushing in Inside Story make out a nice case for its charm and indigeneity. The illustration below is from John Gould’s Mammals of Australia. 

There is a helpful article published by the Australian Museum entitled Is It a Rat? It aims to help us to distinguish between common rat-like animals of Australia - the black rat, the brown rat, ring-tailed possums, and bush rats. Unfortunately, apart from confusion with possums (small ones) Australians do not easily distinguish between indigenous and foreign rats, or for that matter, between rodents and marsupial “rats”. 

As Zhou suggests very eloquently of Bonyhady’s book “In many ways, this book is about that language and literature itself. Like it or not, there is a certain way we talk about rats. There is a rat canon. There are rich stylistic rules. That is part of the fun. Much of the book is quotation, line after line of fantastically vibrant rat reportage from the 19th century.” 

There was a recent debate on Twitter, sparked by @GreenJ (Jonathan Green) about depredations by pests in suburban food gardens. It soon became a debate about whether the possum could be called a “pest”, as rats can be. “No, it can’t be a pest” some said, “the possum is a native animal.” Alas, many Australian native animals are called rats. I remember my father once referring to particular animals as “rat-like things”. These were antechinuses, a charming and protected Australian marsupial. 

There are seven or eight native Australian species of rattus, according to Peter Banks, writing in The Conversation in 2016. They arrived in Australia at least a million years ago. The bush rat, rattus fuscipes is one of these, and there are many other rodents too, as well as rat-like marsupials carelessly lumped in with true rats; here is one of many articles about the difference. As Bonyhady suggests, the now-iconic bilby was fortunate not to be called a rat. 

Banks also dispels what he calls the urban myth that you are never more than two metres or six feet away from a rat. The article cited suggests that the figure is more likely to be fifty metres, which still seems close; the same article suggests that there may be 10.5 million rats in the UK. 

So ambivalence and confusion mark our attitudes to rats. Let us hope that the “fantastically vibrant rat reportage” of the 19^th century continues today, as we enter the Year of the Rat.