Langton - Rat: How the Worlds Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top

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Contents

For Teensy, Dida, and the H-Dogg

Strange Bedfellow

In 1994, a 24-year-old woman went to an emergency room at a hospital in Hempstead, England. She was suffering from a high fever and a large abscess on the inside of her left elbow. She had no history of such symptoms and had no idea why she was sick. Doctors brought her fever down and drained her abscess, which showed traces of both streptococcus and e. coli. Four days later, she returned. Again she had a high fever and this time she had an even larger abscess on the top of her right foot. Eight days after that, she came back again, this time with three different abscesses. Extensive interviews revealed that she slept with her pet rat. Doctors suspected that the abscesses were the result of rat bites and local authorities confiscated the pet. The abscesses disappeared and the patient recovered fully.

Source: British Medical Journal

An Eating and Reproducing Machine

Unless youre huge, Ed is probably bigger than you. Hes the kind of guy who has to duck when he goes through some doorways and sometimes has a hard time finding suits that fit. Now that hes a consultant and making some real money, thats become a bit of a problem. But the former college football player wasnt wearing a suit on the cold April morning when he went out to clean his garage. Instead, he was wearing the new blue-and-yellow Columbia ski jacket that he got as a gift at some corporate event. He knew it was too nice a jacket to wear to clean the garage, but it was cold out and the jacket was handy, so thats what he had on.

Hed only been in the garage once before, when he looked at the house before buying it. It was a mess, but it didnt make much difference to him. Ed was desperate to get into Torontos skyrocketing real estate market while prices were still headed upward, so he took what was basically the best house he could afford. It had potential, but it also had some drawbacks. It was located in Parkdale, traditionally considered Torontos worst downtown neighborhood, and it had not been well taken care of. The elderly couple whod owned it before Ed werent up to even the most basic maintenance and all their kids lived far away. The house was a dump and the garage was even worse.

But it didnt scare Ed. He was a hardworking guy who, without any help from anyone, had managed to parlay two years of college and his own natural aptitude, charm, perseverance, and twenty years experience in sales into a successful consultancy. He was tough enough to put up with the rough neighborhood until the inevitable spike in housing prices forced it to change for the better. Until then he would do whatever he had to in order to make his little house habitable.

So, armed with a bucket, a bunch of cleansers, a mop, and a broom, he went into the garage. As soon as he opened the door, he heard the scurrying of small feet. Damn squirrels, he thought. Squirrels, in particular eastern gray squirrels, are everywhere in Toronto, as they are in many big North American cities. Theyre bigger and more aggressive than most other tree squirrels and are better adapted to life close to humans. When gray squirrels arrive, red squirrels (whose young are often eaten by gray squirrels) are usually forced out. Gray squirrels, which can be quite charming as they flit from tree to tree and beg for treats, were introduced to many European city parks shortly after World War II. By 1970, they had driven out much of the local fauna and became pests. On both sides of the Atlantic, they are known to invade our homes and gnaw at our garbage cans, but are generally tolerated, even enjoyed, because they keep their distance and they are pretty cute.

But Ed was in no mood for a bunch of fuzzy-tailed freeloaders in his garage. He knew that nesting squirrels could cause major structural damage and, from the smell, he could tell that it had become the rodents neighborhood restroom. I knew it wasnt a long-term solution, but I acted on instinct, he said. Im 260 pounds, and a squirrel is what half a pound? He should be scared of me. Even if I couldnt get rid of them for the long run, at least I could scare the shit out of them.

He grabbed his broom and started batting it at where he heard the scurrying. The garage had beams about nine feet off the ground and someone years earlier had used them to store a bunch of now-decaying cardboard boxes. Some were balanced on the beams themselves, others were resting on boards placed on top. Ed smacked the boxes. He whacked a stack of old newspapers. He smashed a roll of insulation and his entire life changed.

Nobody but the rat will ever know if it took flight because of the impact of Eds broom or because it decided to jump for safety. He said that it leapt, as Ive seen rats do, straight up, somersaulting in the air. It twisted its backbone in midflight, like a cat, to ensure a feetfirst landing. It landed on Eds head.

It all happened too quickly for him to react. Maybe it jumped again or maybe it just bounced, but when Ed finally realized what was happening, the rat was in the hood of his jacket. Immediately, he tried to hit the rat with the broom. For its part, the rat tried to climb out of the hood, but the broom-handle assaults probably prevented its escape. Ed ran out of the garage and into the alley. He lay down in a patch of grainy gray snow and rolled, hoping to kill the intruder. As Ed put his weight on his right shoulder, the rat squirted out, running into the shadows, looking none the worse for the encounter.

Ed freaked out. He couldnt sleep in the house that night and told me hes had rat-themed nightmares ever since. He threw the coatoriginally worth about $300 but now with a hood full of rat fecesaway.

Were sitting in a booth at a fast-food restaurant as he tells me the story and I notice he rarely looks at me when hes talking. He looks at his hands instead, reliving every little gesture, every parry and blow. Its clear to me that hes telling the truth because hes sweating even though its cold in the restaurant. Hes getting pretty intense, so I try to lighten the mood. Half joking, I asked him if he had to change his pants after the encounter. He turned and looked me silently, sternly in the eye for at least a minute. Have you ever had a rat in your clothes? he asked me. I couldnt speak; I just shook my head. Ed now lives in a town house in suburban Oakville.

Perhaps Ed was overreacting. It was only a rat, after all. Rarely topping more than a pound in weight, the timid rat hardly seems like much of a threatsome people even keep them as pets.

Its not as though Ed ran into a lion in his garage. Equipped with giant retractable claws, bone-crushing jaws with three-inch canines and a startlingly athletic 550-pound frame, a lion can run 50 mph and bring down prey as large as a 2000-pound cape buffalo with what seems like ease. While an encounter with a single lion would almost certainly cause a human more damage than a confrontation with a single rat, those contacts are exceedingly rare.