Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top

by Jerry Langton

Rats

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Animals, Science Nature, Science, Nature

207 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Kirsten · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, this was a big disappointment. I'm fascinated by rats, and tend to grab any new books about them that come out. I found this book to be sensationalistic and at times almost offensive, however.

Langton is a great lover of hyperbole, and while the exerpts from various government reports and academic articles that he quotes at the beginning of each chapter are documented, the other statistics and facts he mentions throughout the book are not. They are also often stated in such a way as to sound frightening, but to be completely meaningless. For example, he states that "according to a 1995 study, 10 to 100 percent of pet rats and 50 to 100 percent of the wild rats in any given population in North America carry the rat-bite fever virus. It's fatal in 13 percent of caes in humans, despite antibiotic treatment." There are several huge problems with this statement. 1) Langton never cites his source. 2) Rat-bite fever in North American is most commonly caused by Streptobacillus moniliformis, which is a bacterium, not a virus (Langton should have caught this in particular, since viral infections can't be treated with antibiotics). 3) According to the CDC, UNTREATED rat-bite fever has a mortality rate of 7-10%, which makes his reported mortality rate of 13% in treated cases unlikely. 4) And finally, the statistic "10-100%" is just completely meaningless and meant as a scare tactic. "It might be a small number of them, it might be ALL OF THEM! WE JUST DON'T KNOW!" The fact that one paragraph contains so many factual errors and exaggerations forces me to question the quality of research in the rest of the book, particularly since it is not in any way documented.

On a more personal note, I found Langton's characterization of pet rat owners to be mocking and one-sided. The book is strewn with quotes from a petition from petitiononline.com, titled "Don't Take Are Rats," protesting the proposed ban of pet rats in Saskatchewan. Due to the nature of online petitions, I don't doubt that many of the comments on the petition were poorly spelled or worded, but Langton seems to have purposefully chosen the most egregious examples of the lot. The one rat-owner he actually interviews in the book is a goth panhandler who goes by Raven and keeps rats in order to frighten the squeamish. He writes, of rat owners, "The ones I met fell into two basic groups: the minority were like Raven, those who had rats to scare or freak out people (usually their parents) and those who had rats as an affected display of their kindness to society's least-loved creature [...] Although they can all be included into one of two distinct groups, the common thread among rat owners I encountered was that they all considered themselves highly, if not extraordinarily, intelligent and wildly unappreciated."

As a rat owner myself, I'm offended by his condescending manner and his assumption that I am either eager to frighten the unwary, or I'm narcissistic and affected. For the record, I keep rats because I find them to be far more affectionate and intelligent than other small caged animals, and keeping a cat or dog is impractical for me. I also enjoy observing their particular behaviors, and yes, I find them cute! Langton believes that you are either a rat-person, or a non-rat-person, and that will not change. I've found this to be far from the case. While a minority of my friends are completely squicked by my rats, most of them have come to appreciate and enjoy them to a degree that's surprising even to themselves. The world of people who enjoy rats as pets is full of eccentrics, but I doubt any more so than that of people who are enthusiastic about a particular breed of dog or about pet parrots.

So, verdict? The book is poorly researched, or at least poorly documented, and while it may provide an interesting diversion, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is looking for anything other than scare stories. If you're looking for good non-fiction about rats, I would instead recommend Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan.

[LG (A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've been interested in rats for years, ever since an assignment in my undergraduate psychology class required me to train a rat to perform a series of tasks. Shortly after finishing that assignment, I got my first pet rat, and a year or two later I spent some time in Chicago, researching the city's rodent control program. When I spotted this book in the library, I decided to give it a shot. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a huge disappointment.

Given that Langton is a journalist, I wasn't expecting a very scholarly work. I figured he'd write about his experiences following around people who spent lots of time around rats and pepper his accounts with various well-known rat facts, like “their rib cages are collapsible” and “their teeth grow constantly.” Langton did a bit of that – he spoke with pet rat owners, sewer workers, exterminators, and biologists, and then spent time writing about some of the usual topics that come up in books about rats, like rat physiology, the diseases they can give to humans, and the various ways humans have tried to deal with them. One of the first things that annoyed me about this book, however, was that, although Langton occasionally referred to specific studies, experiments, and reports, he never bothered to cite them. Only the book's occasional “fact boxes” and the quotes that prefaced each chapter ever included sources.

I might not have minded the lack of citations so much if it Langton's biases hadn't been so obvious. He focused on the scariest stories and statistics he could find. My favorite example of one of the book's most meaningless attempts to scare readers is this: “According to a 1995 study, 10 to 100 percent of pet rats and 50 to 100 percent of the wild rats in any given population in North America carry the rat-bite fever virus.” (25) First, which 1995 study? Who conducted it? How was the study performed? Second, why were these numbers even worth citing? The range of percentages is so huge that, at best, all they really tell readers is that pet rats are far less likely to carry the disease than wild rats. Third, rat-bite fever is caused by bacteria, not a virus. I couldn't help but wonder how many other factual mistakes Langton included.

I found it aggravating that, anytime any of Langton's interviewees had something even a little positive to say about rats (or at least not wholly negative), he declared them wrong. When a sewer worker reassured him that the rats they encountered wouldn't bite him unless he picked them up, Langton wrote that he was wrong and went into detail about how rats have been known to bite sleeping people, often children, after smelling food on them. How, exactly, did any of that mean the sewer worker was wrong?

Langton was similarly dismissive of S. Anthony Barnett's opinion that George Orwell's “torture by box of rats” scene in 1984 had little connection to what would have happened in reality. Langton seemed to equate “even docile rats will sometime bite” with “the possibility of having your face eaten off by a box of rats is totally true.” Considering that Barnett had more personal experience with rats than Langton could ever dream of, and considering that Langton spelled Barnett's name wrong each and every time (he spelled it as “Barrett”), I'm more inclined to trust Barnett, thank you very much.

His dismissive, condescending attitude was most obvious when it came to pet rat owners. Supposedly, he spoke to 100 or so pet rat owners, and every single one of them was either an attention-seeking, outside-the-mainstream sort who delighted in the way “normal” people were freaked out by their rats or the kind of person who felt they should be patted on the back for caring for one of society's least-loved animals (I wonder, which category did Langton put Debbie Ducommun in?).

I had to wonder how Langton found these people, because they didn't sound like myself or any of the pet rat owners I've known. In my case, I owned rats because, at the time, fish or caged pets were my only option, and I found rats to be more affectionate and playful than most other rodents I'd had experience with. I rarely took my rats out into public and certainly didn't delight in owning a “weird” pet.

All in all, this is not a book I could recommend to anyone. Its bad editing and lack of documentation, combined with Langton's biases, means that none of its information can be trusted.

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rat is, unsurprisingly, very much cut from the same mold as Robert Sullivan's Rats. They differ in journalistic particulars, which I'll get to, but they're both from the themed collection of facts school of book writing, and they emerge from the impulse to use facts to sell papers/books rather than to pose and answer questions. Obviously as an academic I think that's a bad way to write a book in general, but with rats it's much more annoying. Rats sell magazines and books as a boogeyman, which gives authors plenty of incentive to play up that narrative with anecdote and personal experience and also to maybe not work too hard to emphasize the degree of confidence and commonness that can be ascribed to certain wowing tidbits.

Langton is a bit more bold about the fact that this is journalism, not academia. He cites dozens of scientific and historical facts about rats, often with only minimal caveats as to their reliability. Yet not a single one of them has a citation! There is no way to chase down these claims and get more information on how they were determined or whether any of them are sheer hearsay and poppycock. Langton claims, for instance, that rats can leap 4 feet up in the air without a running start. I've seen young rats do 2 ft, but four seems like it would take a special kind of rathlete. But maybe it's typical in wild rats who have to do that sort of thing to access garbage. Hard to be sure, since I don't know where Langton got that information. That's something I don't let my undergrad students get away with on throwaway assignments and I don't understand why his editor let him get away with it (or maybe they had him cut it, who knows).

Where Sullivan dismissed pet rats as a fundamentally different animal, not worthy of his consideration, Langton seems quixotically fascinated with the pet rat owner, an object of his gawking narration even more than the rats themselves. He interleaves chapters with, among other documents, three letters sent to the Saskatchawan government to protest their proposed ban on pet rats. Many of these are clearly written by children, full of pent-up anger and shoddy grammar, and it feels exploitative and cruel. It's hard to imagine the logic behind their inclusion, and it feels vaguely unethical? There's a chapter that partly covers contemporary pet rat owners, and the tone is disgustingly psychoanalytic. He paints us as weirdo loner goth outsiders, probably unattractive and shunned by their families, who identify with rats because they're outcasts. Oof.

(To give a sense of just how much of an out-of-touch Boomer Langton comes off as: "It doesn't come as a huge surprise that he's into a style of music he calls "death metal" and used to play in some "pretty nasty" bands himself.")

Part of that bitterness seems to come from an antagonism he established after publishing the articles that formed the seed for this book. He got a lot of angry mail from pet rat owners and advocates who were doing some damage to the facts in order to make our little friends look good. This is, unfortunately, entirely believable, and I can see it getting pretty annoying. He seems to have overcorrected a teensy bit, and he pretty uncritically frames rats as a historic and universal enemy of the human race, which is dumb.

All of that collectively got me pretty upset with Mr. Langton, and I was about ready to tweet angrily about how fuckin heated people would get if someone wrote a book like this about stray dogs--how gross they were, how many people they'd killed (one of Langton's clearest whoppers is that more people are bitten by rats than any other animal--all the stats I could find didn't even mention them; dogs are the clear leader, and cats in second, for obvious reasons), how hard they are to control, etc. But then he did it! He claims to be responding to pet rat owners who liken rats to dogs, and points out that this is a bad comparison since dogs are so brutal. That got my attention and won me over a bit.

After that I found some other redeeming features here. First, he does a lot of on the ground reporting, but unlike Sullivan, he never makes a big deal out of his own experiences. It's so low-key that his biggest pilgrimage (the Karni Mata rat temple in India) I'm not actually sure he made, which isn't great, but it's better than Sullivan's pretentious Thoreau-lite fare. Second, his weird hangups didn't stop him from interviewing over a hundred (he claims) pet rat owners and looking into the history of their domestication, which Sullivan just wrote off. He never discusses the advantages of rats as pets, of course, but it's something.

Finally, despite the lack of sources, he generally puts anecdotal claims at arm's length, at least implying he's interested in vetting claims and that the other facts are from primary lit or experience by extension (not that that's the only reason to cite sources, obv). He also shows a ton more curiosity about rat evolution, ecology, and history than Sullivan did, which of course is the whole point of the endeavor (from my end). The benefits of that curiosity are a bit tempered by the fact that I can't dive into the bibliography and learn more, but it's appreciated.

It's just a shame that he completely lacks the historian's self-consciousness of his own culture, of the assumptions he brings to this project. He never questions why he or his readers might take the idea of keeping rats as pets to be taboo and weird. He takes it for granted that rats are disgusting and any aberrations from that idea must be explained through desperation or pathology. For instance, he discusses the filthy and disease-laden conditions of Africans with Black rats living in their thatched roofs in lurid detail, like living near animal poop was some unique form of African poverty and suffering, and then reveals that these rats constitute a major food source for those households. It's painted as a uniquely modern problem, a situation born of desperate poverty and the defaunation of landscapes by overhunting and habitat conversion. The idea that *not* eating rats might be a more unique and Western phenomenon doesn't seem to have occurred to him. Of course there is no discussion of the potentially complex and interactive nature of this relationship as rats became domestic animals in the first place.

[Loni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh my god- Oh my god- Oh my god.

For a week I lived in fear of the plague, I'm not kidding.

I now will ALWAYS wash my grains and rice before cooking (Grandma you were right!)

I still eat peanut butter but the first spoonful is always followed by a statistical comment from my husband which i could probably have done without knowing for the rest of my life.

I have yet another justification for not ever wanting to live in New York City AND holding my breath when the 'wind' wuffs up from the dark recesses of the New York subways. ( I new I wasn't just being paranoid!)\

Our cat is now the GOD of the house for his rodent repellent abilities. Riddley you rock.

I do appreciate that they are smart and cute, however--- I am glad I have only ever lived with them by choice.

Read this book it will totally freak you out, but not as bad as zombies.

[Rossdavidh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subtitle: How The World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way To The Top

To close the first chapter, Langton answers the question, why write about the rat?

"The rat may be small and ugly. It may not inspire awe as it nibbles and gnaws and skulks its way through life. But it can do something remarkable. It can compete with us as a wild animal and win. It hasn't become our friend like the dog or our captive like cattle, but instead lives alongside us, as constant companion, irritant, and sworn enemy. While human mistakes and negligence have led many species to extinction and thousands to the brink of annihilation, gargantuan, concerted efforts to rid ourselves of rats have failed miserably. There are more now than ever before and their population continues to boom. Truly it is the animal we can't get rid of, the only one capable of challenging human hegemony of the planet, that deserves to be called King of Beasts."

You've read a hundred stories about humanity driving some beautiful or terrifying animal to the brink of extinction, or beyond. This is the story about what happens when we try, but cannot.

I bought this book a while back, and it stayed on my "needs to be read" shelf, getting passed over in favor of weightier matters, until I became aware that the rats had returned to my attic. We had them years ago, but a raccoon moved in and that seemed to send them on their way. Then the raccoon left, and for a while we had no neighbors upstairs. Once they returned, I did what any self-respecting nerd would do:
1) I got on the internet and found someone to email, and then send an electronic payment to, to fix the problem
2) I started reading a book on the subject

So, it turns out that having a rat infestation in your house (ok, maybe that's an exaggeration since I never saw one, but anyway), and reading a book about rats right before going to bed, does not help you sleep well. But, it was freakin' fascinating.

Langton is not here to tell you that rats are actually beautiful and gentle. He's here to tell you that there is only one thing, in the history of the planet, which has ever permanently eradicated black rats (rattus rattus) from a region of any significant size. That one thing, is an infestation of brown rats (rattus norvegicus). It's not immediate, but over time the brown rats will shove their slightly smaller cousins out of the area. There may be years go by in which the black rats live in the attics, and the brown rats live in the basements, but eventually the brown rats take over.

Poisons, introduced predators, traps, and bait are all manifestly unable to eradicate a rat population for any length of time. The only, ONLY thing that will work is to make sure they can't get to any food. Langton spend several chapters telling about the many, many failed attempts by humans to get rid of rats, going back to the dawn of history (more properly, the dawn of grain agriculture).

Because, in reality, the reason rats have boomed in population is, us. More precisely, our agriculture. We grow food that they like, and then we clear the area of large predators. Mature rat females can nurse while pregnant, and it takes about as long for them to wean as to gestate, so as soon as one litter is ready to send on their way, the next litter is ready to be born. There is really no way to kill them fast enough, if they have food available, and places to hide in which natural predators cannot get into. Our houses could hardly be better designed for fostering rats if we'd tried.

One more quote from Langton, from near the end.

"Of course, it doesn't take a genius to see that the rat's story is a disturbingly familiar allegory of our own. Rats started small and only a few thousand short years ago they were struggling for their very existence with the other competitors in swamps while we were duking it out with the other big predators on the grasslands. But then these animals started living together for mutual safety and to gather enough food so that their increasingly large omnivorous colonies fed during hard times. They made elaborate homes and developed social structures that simplified their lives and ensured that important genetic material was spread around, further guaranteeing the survival of the group. They learned ways to protect themselves from their enemies and from the poisons in their environment. They have been so successful that they number in the billions and occur in every country in the world.

But the flipside of their almost unprecedented success has been the destruction they've caused. Rats have transformed a large number of islands into wastelands barren of any other animal life. They have been responsible for the extinction of hundreds of species of plants and animals and the regional extirpation and endangerment of many more. They have killed plenty of their own kind and millions of ours. They destroy their habitat and environment, while breeding at a rate that seems ridiculous when compared to what the world will actually sustain."

This, really, is why "Rat" is a great book to read. It is a dark mirror of our own species, both by analogy and by looking at our response to them. There is only one way to reduce or eliminate the rat population: clean up and secure the food and water sources. There is no other way. You can spend money on designer chemicals, it will only provide temporary relief (if that). You can pay people to kill them with traps, either of spring-loaded wire or glue. You can pay as much money as you wish, but if you do not address the root of the problem, they can simply adapt and reproduce their way around your defenses.

Rats are what happen when you are too lazy to fix the root cause. Instead, put your house in order. Like so many of our problems today, the problem is not so much that the solution is hard to figure out, as that it is something which cannot be substituted for. No wonder chemical can fix the problem, but there are plenty of people willing to take your money in exchange for lying to you, and telling you that they can make the problem go away without you having to address the root cause. Pick almost any environmental, medical, or financial problem today, and the pattern is similar. The rat, is both consequence and symbol of our failings as a society. Fix the root cause, or all will be in vain. Langton shows us the long history of humans, failing to fix the root cause, while the problem only grows in numbers.

Why are rats the only mammal able to thrive in the face of such revulsion from humans? Because they are our evil twin. Read up on your evil twin, Langton's book is an excellent source. But don't do it right before you go to sleep.

[Peacegal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rats—how we hate them, fear them, love them, and study them. How we kill them and they kill us. And above all, how the rat owes his success to the human, who is more like the rat than we’d ever care to admit.

Rats have little sympathy, especially when the animals in question are wild rats. There is virtually no push to spare them. Because of this, people are often at their ugliest when dealing with the rodents. Entire websites are dedicated to swapping stories and tips about killing rats. On one such website, the author notes, 24% of respondents said they feel "orgasmic" after killing a rat.

Domestic rats get a little more sympathy. They, along with mice, are the most common animals used in lab experiments, but they are afforded zero protection under the Animal Welfare Act. Various animal welfare groups work to improve the lot of rats used in research and testing, however, they still have nowhere near the advocacy of, say, chimpanzees. Pet rat breeding, ownership, and adoption have their adherents in various degrees. Speaking broadly, the people who are devoted to domestic rats are surprisingly similar to those who adore aggressive dogs—read the book and you’ll see what I mean. The rat becomes an extension of self—and perhaps that’s why we feel the way we do about rats.

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed most of this book, but these are the things that stopped me from giving it five stars:

- The poor proof-reading. Langton repeated some points several times, and I found at least two misspellings.

- The lack of citations/references.

- The poorly-concealed disdain that Langdon holds for rat fanciers and their pets. As someone who is also "eccentric" and has "tattoos, piercings, or other look-at-me adornments", I'm not sure what is wrong with any of these things - or with thinking that rats are cute (and smart, and affectionate...) The excerpts from the online petition ("Don't Take Are Rats") are surely meant to be further illustrations of the stupidity of rat fanciers. All of this condescension was the worst part of this book.

- We didn't really get what we were promised in the title. While I did read lots of fascinating rat facts (rats have been found living in meat lockers! rat gestation and weaning periods are roughly equal! rats have been found trying to mate with dead rats! rats can inadvertently tie their tails together while fighting or mating!) there wasn't much about rat history. How DID the rat claw its way to the top of the evolutionary heap?

[Sarah Olson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I am not finished with Rat, that will not impede my reviewing prowess. This book is an entertaining book, however the author is very obviously not a rat person (he divides the world into rat lovers and haters. Personally, I'm ambivalent) and is very obviously a journalist. Though this perspective makes for a much more interesting read than, say, a masters thesis on Rattus rattus, the author is not trying to encourage rat lovers and their hobby. A final note: this book will make you glad to find mouse droppings in your house. Why? Read the book :)

[Anna Rohleder · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think I thought this was the *other* book about rats, which got a lot of hype a few years ago... However this particular one reads as though it were downloaded as a rough draft directly from the author's computer to the printing presses: not only are there numerous typos, but in general it suffers from an obvious reliance on cut-and-paste, with the concomitant amount of repetition and lack of focus. As a result I put it down after the second chapter.

[Eric Proctor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very enlightening and entertaining read about rats, a topic that many people don't like. It is also a very quick read. There were a few times when it got repetitive. I kept thinking, "Didn't I read this already?" But, if you like natural history, it is worth checking out.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written. Felt like Jerry was a little tough on rat owners.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting, light but comprehensive. Not for the squeamish. Long live the Chicago Rat (Squirrel) Hole

[D D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surprisingly fascinating and informative.

[Jeff Jellets · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a bad place to begin a relationship with the world's most unlovable rodent ...

Every once in a while, I pick up an “animal book.” The last one might have been Richard Ellis’s superb The Search for the Giant Squid but this time my taste tended toward more terrestrial tendencies. It’s rats – or more specifically Jerry Langton’s Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top. I suppose there’s a bit of a formula to this genre, usually a mixture of genuine zoology spiced with a bit of folklore, amazing animal stories, and some myth-busting, and Langton’s study of the most unlovable of rodents pretty much hits all those bases.

From rat biology to rat evolution, Langton covers the scientific basics of the beast – certainly enough for the layperson to get a pretty good feel for both rat physiology and sociology – and is pretty good at keeping things interesting by emphasizing the bizarre. Rats, for example, seem to be something of a troop of sex fiends with the males having significantly over-sized … ummm … equipment and females being quite the prolific homemakers. According to Langton, a three-year-old female rat can have some 43 litters and, adding in the reproductive potential of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, can be responsible for some 16,000 offspring in a single year and close to 100,000 in three years’ time. Rats also practice thingmophilia (a “love of touching); their sense of touch is so well-developed that only the bravest of rats will venture out into the open. Most seek the comfort of continual contact with a wall or other inanimate objects even when moving.

Of course, no “animal book” is complete without a healthy dose of good stories, and Langton has plenty of fodder when it comes to rats. While there are a few reliable chestnuts, like the rat’s involvement in the spread of the medieval Black Death, there’s plenty of refreshingly new information too. Langton’s recounting of the hunt of the missing rat Razza and the battle between rodent and New Zealander for control of the Campbell Islands are particularly memorable. The author is also able to explain how the paw prints of the rat are arguably all over the extinction of the dodo and is able to give us a bit history on the exploits of the original rat catcher Jack Black (and the first white rat).

Stylistically, there were points where the prose felt a bit more at the level of the young adult reader and could have used a little more sophistication and depth. However, if for some reason rats catch your fancy (and Langton offers a not-quite-so-flattering assessment of exactly the type of people most likely to gravitate in that direction), then Rat is a pretty good place to start your survey of the rodent world.

A bit of an addendum ... I usually take a book pretty much at face value, but as I was posting this review, I did a bit of a Google search and, in the interest of full disclosure, there's quite a bit of vitriol heaped on this book -- certainly from rat lovers. While I generally enjoyed this book, anyone seeking a counter viewpoint might want to check out the critique from Debbie "The Rat Lady" (who actually makes an appearance in Langton's book) at The Rat Report at http://www.ratfanclub.org/notorious.html.

[Hilary "Fox" · Rating 1 out of 5]

OH NO, NOT RATS!!!

Jerry Langton decides to delve into why rats have been around for so long, how they coexist with us, and why people decide to have them as pets. He does so with a distinct anti-rat perspective on the world, and a disturbing unwillingness to ever waver in his opinion or seek out people who think differently than himself. That, my friend, is why the book failed for me. The inherent prejudice against rats and rat-owners that permeated every page and the outright disgust that just saturated his language. That was why it got the dreaded one-star.

Langton has some interesting history of rats, he follows the basic run down of "this is why rats are interesting" that any writer would. Their ribs can collapse being the main fact that seems to shock him. He discounts their inherent intelligence when just about all scientific papers rate them as among one of the most intelligent animals out there, and he counts them as viscous and ready to attack when even the rat hunters he talks to admit that they only do so when disturbed. It's disturbing, just not in the way he meant it to be.

The true failing of this book, however, was the way that he wrote about rat owners. I've owned rats in my time. I found them to be very clean, very affectionate, curious and entertaining pets. I was only ever bit by a rat once, and that was when I startled him and truly deserved it. Langton puts rat owners into two groups: people owning a rat for the novelty and attention seeking deviant nature of it, and people owning rats as an apology to the species and taking it on as a burden. What the hell? What about people who just genuinely like the animal and what it offers...? Nevermind the fact he characterized the first group as being largely obese women with multiple piercings and or tattoos. Just... why?

[Elentarri · Rating 2 out of 5]

In [b]Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top[/b], journalist Jerry Langton superficially explores the history, myth, physiology, habits, psyche and future of the rat. This is a short, super-lite, popular science book in the style of Mary Roach without all the silly jokes and excessive fashion commentary.

In the author's words:
[i]"The rat may be small and ugly. It may not inspire awe as it nibbles and gnaws and skulks its way through life. But it can do something remarkable. It can compete with us as a wild animal and win. It hasn't become our friend like the dog or our captive like cattle, but instead lives alongside us, as constant companion, irritant, and sworn enemy. While human mistakes and negligence have led many species to extinction and thousands to the brink of annihilation, gargantuan, concerted efforts to rid ourselves of rats have failed miserably. There are more now than ever before and their population continues to boom. Truly it is the animal we can't get rid of, the only one capable of challenging human hegemony of the planet, that deserves to be called King of Beasts. You've read a hundred stories about humanity driving some beautiful or terrifying animal to the brink of extinction, or beyond. This is the story about what happens when we try, but cannot."[/i]

The author takes a look at anything to do with rats, including their involvement in the plague, their role as pets, extermination issues, their global spread and commensal relationship with humans etc in a fun, superficial manner and conveniently leaves out any references so you have no idea if the author is sucking "facts" out of his thumb or is reporting actual observable data or scientific studies. The book has many interesting observations and anecdotes that involves rats, but is a rather lacking in substance (and references).

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fact that I finished this book easily (instead of forcing myself through a few pages a night until its overdue status at the library offers a legitimate excuse to return it, unfinished) says a lot for it. Its amusing narrative reads more like anecdotal encounters with rats rather than a scientific expose, which is just fine with me. Okay, the author did include tons of current research on rats, but none of it was his own (I'm refusing to accept his trek through the sewers or night of dumpster diving as evidence for his theories on rattie behavior). In fact, it kind of read like a college research paper that's gotten so overgrown that some of the same information gets repeated again and again. A bit sloppy, if you ask me... Like for instance the fact that rats' favorite food is scrambled eggs, and how water is more important to rats than food.

Also, I was disappointed that it wasn't more gruesome. The back teasers said it was creepy. Reading about how rats survive and such is unnerving, I admit, but not quite creepy. That's the real reason I picked this book up from the stacks--I was highly anticipating a new neurosis (fear of rats and all things rodent), or at the very least some serious shivers. The most this book evoked was a couple face screwing "Ew's." That's it. All things considered, though, it wasn't too bad...

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lot like Mary Roach's books Stiff and Bonk. I really enjoyed it. It was, as one review on the back of the book says, "appallingly informative." I already disliked rats (to me they are even worse than snakes), but now I ABHOR them. It's funny to me how the author obviously does, too.

Here is a really gross tidbit. People in the Philippines have eaten rats for centuries, but since it's frowned on by Westerners, they try to hide it--rat meat is sold in grocery stores as "star" meat. It sounds like it's kind of like rat Spam: "rats are killed and canned in an industrialized way, which greatly decreases the chances for contamination and disease transmission and indicates that the people eating it aren't exactly starving."

Other gross things I learned are: male rats will have sex with any available female rat, including a dead one; rats have a collapsible rib cage that makes it possible to pass through shockingly small spaces and INTO YOUR HOUSE; if you are using a jackhammer, you might get to see a horde of rats exploding up out of the ground to escape (they think it's an earthquake); and Michael Jackson sang the theme song to the movie Ben. How do I not remember that?

[Pandionhalatius37.6 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an easy 5 stars. It provides an earthly, realistic and unflinchingly honest look at rats as a species and their interaction with humans through our shared history. If you read nothing else of factual weight this year, this book is positively full of organized, easy to understand facts and follows the rat from the prehistoric era through its impact on the global food supply. And the ride doesn't stop there; Jerry Langton includes an accurate and well sourced hypothesis on the future of the rat as a species. A combination of collected views from the people who exterminate, eradicate, and have their property destroyed by rats rounds out this informative read. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the natural world or how human beings interact with other species, or just for a different perspective on that lurking, scampering basement terror whose habits and history so often goes unseen.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Quick, easy read mixing interesting trivia with interesting history on the origins and spread of rats across the world, and the history of different human interactions with rats around the world up to the present day. Not the most authoritative rat-book, but hey, it's written by a journalist, so...
It really put me off how at one point the author characterized/generalized pet rat owners in a condescending way--apparently, we're all wierdos who keep rats either as an affectation or as a scary accessory, so all us rattie-lovers are doing it out of vanity, not out of appreciation of a highly intelligent and affectionate animal whose upkeep is cheaper, lower-maintenance, and work-schedule-friendly than dogs or cats...ok dude, I can tell you're not a 'rat person'--but other than that a pretty good read.

[Fishface · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great little book about many fascinating aspects of the rats that have travelled everywhere on the heels of (or in the garbage trucks of) human civilization. More readable and gripping than Sullivan's book on the same subject, with just as many rats facts that are often different from the ones Sullivan uncovered in his researches. There are a few lapses here -- the author thinks that a clutch of birds' eggs is called a "litter," he always says "sprung" when he means "sprang" and there are a few sentences that simply defy English grammar. But I still like it a lot, and will re-read it with pleasure.

[Laura McKelvey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not make it very far. I finish every book I start, but I am going to go ahead and put this one down. I am not convinced this will be a very educational book about rats. It seems like the author only but half of his interest into it. I could be wrong though. The real reason I am not finishing it is the quote on page 23 comparing rats to "really bad transvestites." I just wanted to read a fun book about rodents. I really did not need any transphobia with it.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book as part of my research for a new TV show I'm producing - one of the episodes is about rats. There were a few interesting case studies about mass e-rat-ication in New Zealand, and a nice history of the bubonic plague, but overall the book didn't provide all that much insight, and wasn't terribly interesting.

[Kristy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Living in Alberta, the one "rat free zone" (supposedly) my whole life, I really had NO idea what rats were all about. I was horrified, to say the least... but really, really fascinated. Langton has done his research... he's gotten in there and experienced it. He knows what he's talking about! Very interesting book!

[Tedders · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a book about one of this worlds top sources of Nightmare fuel 'Rat' was as should be excpected shudder inducing and massively informative, but it was also funny. Langton's style of writing had me laughing aloud more than once.

[S B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a page-turner for me. While I was a bit disappointed at how the author seemed to have a disdain for rats, and it focused a lot on the attempted (Spoiler!: unsuccessful) extermination of rats, the book did contain a lot of great information of the biology and social behavior of rats.

[Darrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

all the statistics on rat birthrates and flexible ribcages can't help but weird one out

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fast non-fiction read about the rodent we love to hate (most of us, anyway). Entertaining as well as informative.

[Miriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and informative.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great! A wonderful non-fiction read that gives history of NYC as well as wierd and interesting info about RATS!