How to Love a Rat: Detecting Bombs in Postwar Cambodia

by Darcie DeAngelo

How to Love a Rat takes place in a Cambodian minefield. Working amid hidden bombs, former war combatants use explosive-sniffing rats to clear mines from the land. In total, an estimated four to six million landmines in Cambodia have been left behind by wars that ended decades ago. This has created the conditions for a flourishing mine-clearance industry, where workers who were once enemy combatants may now be employed on the same clearance teams.

Zeroing in on two distinct sets of feelings, Darcie DeAngelo paints a portrait of the love experienced between humans and rats and the suspicions felt between former adversaries turned coworkers. In doing so, she points to how human-animal relationships in the minefield produce models for relationality among people from opposing sides of war. The ways the deminers love for the rats mediate both the traumatic violence of the past and the uncertain dangers of the minefield. The book's stories depict an transformative postwar ecology emerging through human-nonhuman relationships, including those shared between humans and rats, landmines, and spirits.

195 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 10, 2024

Reviews

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Darcie Deangelo’s how to love a rat was a book I was drawn to on the new release shelf at the library and boy was it a good read! An incredible intersection of humans, rats, war, spirits, religion and post war ecology- a true gem of a book.