Sullivan lives in New York City, a place where legend has it that there is one rat for every human being. Robert Sullivan obviously shares this ambivalence, as do (interestingly) most of the vermin exterminators he comes across in his researches. In short, they have for humans a symbolic or metaphorical life, a representative existence from which we may draw morals, awful warnings and some particularly hateful, if now over-familiar, terms of abuse. Even David Attenborough's commentary contained, as I recall, several audible shudders.Ĭlearly rats represent more to us than their state of being just another animal. Miniature hamsters or koalas they are not. When you remember their verminous habits with droppings and urine, the obnoxious way they regurgitate stuff they can't digest but eat anyway, such as pieces of your dustbin liner, and their uninvited presence in every street in every town in the country, trying to think of them as a mammal with a rightful place in the evolutionary scheme of things becomes impossible. In spite of one's valiant efforts to try to see the rodents as ordinary animals with, so to speak, a point of view, it remained inescapable that a rat's habitat is in drains, cellars and burrows, his food is our leftovers, and he and his mate's reproduction is, well, fast and furious. The trouble was that this time the programme was about rats.
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