Pests remind us we’re not in total control of our cities

The city is anthropocentric. Man does not like rivals. Dogs are on leashes, animals in zoos. Birds and insects are given designated plots in gardens, parks, squares.

But, periodically, we are reminded that we are not in total control by a seasonal invasion of pests.

Pick your demon. Last year it was the explosion of bed bugs that stole the headlines during Paris Fashion Week. (How could the beautiful people be allowed to be scarred by them?) They have been overtaken as the apex predator of our neuroses by the rat.

Rodents have conquered homes, the boulevards of food purveyors and the deep infrastructure of the city, we are told. They probe for weaknesses in our walls and drains, they multiply, they live parasitically upon us, they threaten us with disease.

London is now stalked by super-rats, according to the British tabloids last summer (a downgrade from the “cannibal rats” we had in 2016, I suppose).  There was a second spasm of fear as the cold snap sent rats indoors and columnists competed to discuss their rodent problems.

Last year, the rats followed the visitors to the Colosseum in Rome, and became the spectacle itself. A showdown occurred between the pest and the pest control gladiators. In Paris, the offices of mayor Anne Hidalgo would like to rid the city of cars — pesky things — but have admitted defeat on rats: they have formed a committee to discuss “cohabitation” as a strategy.

But the brown rats have been our companions, welcome or not, throughout the journey of civilisation. A 2017 paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution studied the brown rat’s genome sequencing. It posited that they migrated from South Asia to the Middle East around 3,000 years ago, Africa 2,000 years ago and Europe shortly after.

Rats were co-colonialists with the Europeans when they landed in the Americas. New York, a long-favoured hang-out, now has both Uptown rats and Downtown rats, with distinguishable genetic diversity.

They have an uncanny habit of appearing in our cultural history at points of despair. Sometimes they were cause: as carriers of the fleas that set off the plagues of medieval Europe and late 19th-century China.

At other times, they became the animal analogy to their human counterparts. They lived in trenches during the first world war and inhabited slums, more a signifier of population density and lack of maintenance and city services than poverty itself. In 1969, they over-ran black Harlem. During waves of xenophobia, they appear in cartoons and slogans.

If you were hoping I might provide some rat control methods, I’m a bit short on those. Nor will I condemn those who want to rid their homes of the scuttling intruders. But forgive them first: they are only here because we are here. In our fragility, we want to deny them an existence, in our surfeit we provide them one.

In Paris they have admitted defeat on rats and have formed a committee to discuss ‘cohabitation’ as a strategy

Feral animals live off what humans discard. Raymond and Lorna Coppinger posited in their book What is a Dog?” that village dogs could live off the scraps of humans at a ratio of around 7 to 10 dogs per 100 villagers. Foxes roam through trash. New York, as well as reporting a jump in rat numbers also has around half a million feral cats.

Hopes that they would become a free anti-rat platoon have yet to materialise. Perhaps those cats prefer to hang out with their natural prey outside the local bodega or pizza joint — easier pickings for both.

While vermin remind us of the ancestral fear of pestilence and contagion (upon which the pest control company makes a pretty turn), we live in modern times. They continue to impart diseases. Plague is not so high on the agenda, but other deadly bacterial infections such as leptospirosis continue.

However, the rat has also been our servant in modern medicine, an army of victims for the good of man. One batch of lab rats was particularly heroic as test subjects for warfarin, an anticoagulant derived from sweet clover moulds in the 1940s, which became the world’s most widely common rat poison and blood thinner.

The real fear now is that such a small, uncontrollable thing can break into our super-clean homes, chew out electric cables and undermine our concrete, our sanity and faith in a city to control things.

Could we think of them more benignly? The Koreans have an expression: “Birds listen to day-words and rats listen to night-words” — the equivalent of “walls have ears” though could it be in sympathy?

There is another expression, always issued with disdain: the rat will flee the sinking ship. Now used to refer to cowards, it was originally a wisdom passed by sailors as rats could sense things about to collapse. A harbinger that the good times are over, disaster is coming.

As long as we have rats, we know we are living in a time of abundance. And waste.

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