Kristine lives in Tasmania. In between working as a doctor, she enjoys pottering around with walking, watercolours and words. She is close to completing a Bachelor of Arts at Deakin University, majoring in Creative Writing and English Literature.
Rats of the Anthropocene
Of all the horrors in the world, a rat!
-George Orwell, 1984
The dog turd sparkled in the sunlight, an iridescent copper blue-green, as if Riley had breakfasted on a colony of Christmas beetles. I wondered at it, briefly, bagged and binned it, and we walked on.
Not beetles, it turned out, but rat poison. Riley survived thanks to modern medical technology and an eye-watering vet bill. We found a network of tunnels under the vegetable beds at the back of our garden and half-chewed blocks of poison nearby. A pest man came, who said that the rats had been lured by fallen passionfruit and, after establishing their homes, brought the poison blocks home from a nearby bakery. What we needed, he said, was purpose-built bait stations, little rat diners that allowed rats to access poison but kept dogs and wildlife safe. It was the rats, he said, or Riley.
That was three years ago. Every year since, newly excavated tunnels have appeared with the ripening passionfruit, and the pest man has returned to bait the stations. But as the memory of Riley’s near-death experience fades, a sense of unease is growing.
I was a lonely child, but I didn’t know it. If I wasn’t reading books, I was outdoors. I was entranced by the intricate worlds of insects and ants and spent long hours designing miniature homes and kingdoms for them. I buried my face in the long grass and soursobs and inhaled the aromas of moist soil and growing green things until I was intoxicated. Without warning, I find myself an adult with an indoor job and a house and children of my own, at a time in history when everything about the way we live our lives is called into question. There is a sense of being trapped—rat-like—in a maze I never made a conscious choice to enter. My garden is a promise and a solace and a wonder, the only way to know and nourish the living things that nourish me. It’s early autumn and I’m staking tomato plants that smell like concentrated sunshine when I realise I’m treading in soft, freshly dug earth. The rats are back. It occurs to me that I have never been so directly or casually responsible for the death of animals. Maybe this is a chance to reset.
I know very little about rats, though I can’t help but feel a shiver of disgust when I think of them. I wonder if I can learn to live with rats, maybe even befriend them. I picture myself sipping a coffee under the pear tree, dewdrops twinkling in the morning sun, as rats scamper trustingly around me. My Disney Rat Princess moment doesn’t last long. Rats are nocturnal. Nobody thinks it is a good idea to let rats be. When I mention it to my neighbour, she is (temporarily) rendered speechless.
Then I google ‘is it ok to leave rats alone?’ and learn that rats are social creatures who need intellectual stimulation and cuddles with their humans. They cannot simply be left in their cage for a week while one goes on vacation. That’s when it dawns on me that there are three distinct types of rats, defined not by any biological genus but by their relationship with humans. There are feral rats (kill them), lab rats (don’t ask awkward questions), and pet rats (hire a rat-sitter).
The philosopher Val Plumwood argues the human exceptionalism that justifies lower ethical standards for treatment of animals based on a perceived inferiority to humans. She says that the moral basis of our treatment of animals is (or should be) less about the nature of the beings involved than their respective contexts, contrasting the more justifiable killing of animals for food with killing for sport. I’m beyond grateful that consumption didn’t make my list of rat contexts, t’s clear that, although rats in cages are useful for research or companionship, rats outside of cages cause havoc. They have sex up to twenty times a day, and one pair of rats has the potential for fifteen thousand descendants in a year. They collapse their skeletons to squeeze through the narrowest gaps. They carry a range of diseases: I find a list of fifty-six in Wikipedia, from Amur virus through to plague, typhus and Venezuelan haemorrhagic fever. And, despite a distinct preference for human fast food, they will gnaw through almost anything with incisors that are as strong as steel and grow at the rate of five inches per year.
So, rats must be managed, and poison is an appealing solution because it’s efficient, hands-off, and rats hide away to die. But death from anticoagulant rat poison is painful and slow.
My friend Michelle keeps chooks and is a compost enthusiast. Naturally, she has rats, and it turns out she has also been having qualms.
‘I thought I might trap them and release them far away,’ she says, ‘but my ex-husband laughed at me.’ I imagine a road trip with a box of chittering rats in the back of my car and feel a little queasy.
‘Now I’m thinking the best thing is to trap and freeze them,’ she continues. I imagine trying to bundle a rat into my overstuffed suburban freezer.
‘I got one with a pitchfork once,’ she says, ‘but I don’t recommend it.’ I stop the mental image before it starts.
Later, I find an article on rat control methods. It dismisses relocation as cruel, doesn’t mention freezing, and concludes that the only humane ways to dispatch live-trapped rats are a heavy blow to the back of the head, anaesthesia, or a shotgun. I email it to Michelle, but she doesn’t respond.
Robert Sullivan spent a year researching and observing rats in New York and writes that ‘thinking about rats, as low-down as it seems, can easily lead to thoughts about larger topics, such as life and death and the nature of man.’
Rats are our shadow creatures, our evil familiars. Rats have followed traders, colonisers, and armies across the globe, sharing the spoils and helping spread misery and destruction. They haunt the dark corners of the human world, feeding on our worst excesses and moral failings, thriving amongst garbage and squalor, greed, and neglect.
After thousands of years of cohabitation, it shouldn’t be a surprise that rats are, in many ways, just like us. It’s one of the reasons they are so successful as laboratory animals. Rats live in hierarchical family groups where the mother does all the work of child-rearing, and young rats languish in the absence of parental touch. They are one of the few animals known to wage organised warfare against their own kind. Hans Zinsser, author of the classic 1935 text Rats, Lice and History, observes that, on a planet where all species interact within complex ecosystems, neither rats nor humans are of use to any other creatures. They are, he says, merely the most successful animals of prey.’ Neither has arrived at the social, commercial, or economic stability achieved by ants, bees, and some birds. Both, he says, ‘are utterly destructive. All that nature offers is taken for their purpose, plant and beast.’
A rich symbolism around rats broods in the underbelly of our collective psyche. My shiver of disgust is near universal and predates knowledge of hygiene and disease vectors. Reflecting humanity’s least desirable attributes—ferocity, gluttony, irresponsible fecundity—and being near impossible to control or contain, rats have long been used as a metaphor for groups of people who are unwanted or feared. In her essay examining the place of the rat in modern literature, academic Maud Ellman finds them representing the resurgence of the undead past, the collapse of the boundaries of meaning, superstition and science, mass migration, the rapacity of multinational companies, capital run riot, the destruction of the balance of nature.
All this in the back corner of my garden. On a mellow autumn afternoon, I look at the kiwi vine tussling with the passionfruit, both overshadowing the tomatoes, which need thinning. A self-seeded pumpkin has laid claim to the next bed, and beyond the pumpkin, spinach and kale are bolting. I reflect on the turns of history that have allowed me to put a fence around this proliferation of life and call it mine. Unexpectedly, I feel a sense of fellowship with rats, which, after all, are not intrinsically evil, but going about their ratty lives in ratty ways, the best they know how.
I haven’t yet seen a rat. In my imagination, fifteen thousand writhing bodies carpet my garden in the moonlight, oozing through cracks and crannies and eyeing off the plumbing system (the toilet rat is not a myth). For all I know, they are already nesting under the piles of clothing and sweet wrappers in my teenagers’ bedrooms. I don’t care to look. I remember the one time I’d seen live rats—pet rats that belonged to my friend Danielle. They lived in a large cage in her lounge room, five or six of them, and I’d been intrigued and revulsed by the nimble paws that reminded me of human hands.
I wonder if Danielle has had to deal with outside rats and contact her to ask. She immediately understands what I am getting at. ‘For a long time,’ she says, ‘we had a situation where I fed the house rats treats like porridge and yoghurt and my husband fed the non-house rats little cubes of lethal bait. I suppose it’s just another one of those moral dilemmas we face every day.’
In my eyes, Danielle has the middle-class Anthropocene lifestyle nailed. She has a house full of children and animals, grows food, knits, crafts, and writes. She is kind, and thoughtful. If that is how she manages rats, I decide, that is what I will do, too.
That could have been the end of the story, but I have to admit I haven’t been entirely honest. There is another way to deter rats, which is to keep our homes and streets scrupulously clean, lock away food and rubbish and, in my case, pick up daily the windfallen pears and passionfruit. But life is busy, and the passionfruit are difficult to get to in the long grass between the trellis and fence. Traps could be set, but must be checked twice daily, so that any injured animals can be humanely dispatched.
It is, in the end, one more lesson from rats about human behaviour in the Anthropocene. Our treatment of other beings isn’t just about the moral values we place on their perceived ability to think or to suffer, or the contexts in which we deal with them. It is about our convenience, the privilege of being able to look away, and the reassurance we gain from seeing others act in a similar way.
Citations
Ellmann M (2004) Writing like a rat. Critical Quarterly, 46(4): 59-76.
Plumwood V (2007) ‘Human exceptionalism and the limitations of animals: A review of Raimond Gaita’s The philosopher’s dog’, Australian Humanities Review, 42(August): 1-7.
Sullivan R (2005) Rats: observations on the history & habitat of the city’s most unwanted inhabitants. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (2009), Humane control of rats, mice and moles; detailed advice. Accessed 10 September 2025.