Sure, take a rat to dinner. We do!

IT'S difficult not to react viscerally to the images -- repeatedly shown on television, in newspapers and on YouTube -- of rats scurrying about the KFC/Taco Bell restaurant in New York City's Greenwich Village at night, like villains in a twisted children's book. Throughout history, after all, rats have been associated with plague and pestilence. From works of literature like Dostoyevsky's "Notes From Underground" to psychoanalytic texts like Freud's case study "The Rat Man," the symbolism of rats is uniformly negative. In metaphor, to smell a rat is to sense that something is amiss, and a snitch is called simply a rat. Rats have few fans.

But maybe we should pause to ask whether rats are the proper focus of our fears. Bubonic plague is not a public health issue in Greenwich Village, and the Centers for Disease Control report that, despite widespread superstition, rats have never been shown to carry rabies. It has been estimated that there are anywhere from one to nine rats per New Yorker. When late at night I walk my dog on my quiet Carnegie Hill block, I often hear rodents spelunking through the trash receptacles (my dog seems not to notice them).

posted by RatCam | 12:46 PM | Home

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