The Rat Fan Club
Book Reviews:
Non-Fiction
by Debbie “The Rat Lady”
Book Review: Pleasurable
Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good
(This review appeared in the June 2004 issue of the Rat Report.)
This book written by Rat Fan Club
member Jonathan Balcombe, Ph.D. of
I
found this book extremely enjoyable and interesting. I heartily recommend it to anyone who is
interested in animal behavior.
Jonathan has done a great job of explaining the scientific evidence that
animals experience pleasure in a way that is easy to understand. The book also shows off Jonathan’s
sense of humor. For instance, in
Chapter 3, Feeling Smart, The Intelligence of Pleasure, he says,
“Ultimately, there can be no decisive proof of animal pleasure, any more
than there can be absolute proof that smoking causes lung cancer, or that bacon
is bad for you (it’s certainly bad for pigs.)”
Dr.
Jonathan Balcombe is an animal behavior Research
Scientist for the Washington, DC-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and
author of The Use of Animals in Higher Education: Problems,
Alternatives, and Recommendations.
In addition to published papers on the behavioral ecology of bats,
birds, and turtles, he has written many scholarly and lay articles on animal
use in education and research. A popular speaker, he has given invited
presentations in the
Of
course, Jonathan talks about rats in his book! In fact, rats are mentioned on more than
24 of the pages. Most of the
references are to the research that shows rats enjoy playing and wrestling, and
they laugh when they do so. But
other topics are presented too.
Jonathan describes the different personalities and activity preferences
of his 3 girl rats, and talks some about their food preferences. He also talks about the research that
shows rats dream. Also mentioned is
that rats do better in a maze after being exposed to music by Mozart rather
than modern music by Philip Glass, and that rats will restrain their behavior
if they see that it will cause harm to another rat. Cool!
Here are a few excerpts that
feature rats:
Rats
at Play: Rats mostly play when they
are young, but grown-up rats are also motivated to play. In a laboratory study,
both juvenile and adult male rats showed a significant preference for a box containing
a free moving rat compared to either a box with a rat confined behind a
Plexiglas barrier or a box with no rat. The confined rat was visible, but not
available to play with.
When
rats are anticipating opportunities to play, their brains release a
“pleasure chemical” called dopamine. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp reports a close
link between such chemicals and play, and that rats enjoy being playfully
tickled. These findings complement ample behavioral evidence that play is
enjoyable. Studies at the
Rats
and Food: Rats will enter a deadly
cold room and navigate a maze to retrieve gourmet tidbits (e.g., shortbread,
meat paté, and CocaCola®).
If they happen to find their regular (and less tasty) commercial rat chow at
the end, they quickly return to their cozy nests, where they stay for the
remainder of the experiment. But if they find a tasty treat, they feed on it
before returning home, then return repeatedly for more. This is a rodent
version of shunning the fruit bowl and dashing out to the convenience store on
a rainy night to get some donuts.
Live
and Let Live: One of my favorite
anecdotes comes from naturalist-photographer Lewis Wayne Walker, who discovered
a wild rat running in a rodent exercise wheel he had stored in his barn. By
itself, it’s just an isolated, if compelling, observation. But
what’s to keep people from setting out running wheels (instead of traps)
in places where rats live and monitoring the results?
I do
have to warn you that the chapter on sex is quite explicit, so be
prepared. The beginning of the
chapter says: “Warning: making the case for sexual pleasure in animals
requires venturing into territory that may be distasteful to some readers. If you may be one such, I suggest you
skip to the next chapter.”
The
publisher is Macmillan and the book sells for $24.95. For more on Jonathan and his book tour,
visit his website at www.pleasurablekingdom.com.
Book Review: Rats,
Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted
Inhabitants
(This review appeared in the June 2004 issue of the Rat Report.)
This
book, written by Robert Sullivan and published by
When
I first heard about the book, I was excited. I was looking forward to reading about
observations of wild rats in
If
you read the subtitle of the book—Observations on the History and Habitat
of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants—carefully, you will see
that the observations are not on the rats themselves, but on their history and
habitat. Out of 219 pages, only
about 20 are actually about rats.
The rest is about people and history. Sullivan says he spent a year of nights
observing wild rats in a NYC alley, but he only tells about his observations of
the rats in about 12 pages.
The
most interesting chapters are 2, 6, 8, 13 and 18. The cover art for the book is also
interesting. It shows a rat worked
into a map of NYC.
Chapter
2 (9 ½ pages) starts by describing wild rats. I liked the first paragraph, especially
the last sentence which is “I offer a portrait that is hysteria-free,
that merely describes the rat as a rat.” He proceeds to spend about 3 pages
describing wild rats, both
But
the worst statement he makes is so bad, it’s almost funny. He describes watching rats drink water
from a dirty puddle in the subway, and says, “They sip the water the way
rats do, either with their front paws, or by scooping it up with their
incisors.” The chapter goes
on to describe the different ways wild rats can die (you don’t want to
know) and the history of how wild rats arrived in
Chapter
6 (10 pages) includes about 2 pages of description of Sullivan’s first
observations of the rats in the alley.
He is amazed to find that they bound and gallop, instead of scuttling. Most of this chapter is about a homeless
man Sullivan meets in the alley, Derrick, who shows Sullivan that he can
intimidate the rats in the alley by shouting and stomping on the ground. He claims he has the rats
“trained.” This makes a
big impression on Sullivan who is actually terrified of the rats.
Chapter
8 (6 ½ pages) is titled “Food” and talks about the types of
food wild rats tend to like the best.
Sullivan says it is written in the rat literature that a rat would
starve in an alley surrounded by raw vegetables. Of course, this can’t be
true. But it appears that wild rats
tend to like fast food best, and they apparently tend to prefer the type of
food that is common in their alley.
For instance, rats who live in an alley that backs onto an Indian
restaurant will tend to prefer spicy Indian food to other ethnic styles. Sullivan includes a list of food from a
study done by Martin W. Schein in 1953. Schein trapped
wild rats in
Chapter
13 (6 pages) is called “Trapping,” and is about how Sullivan sets a
live-trap to try to catch a rat in the alley. He is unsuccessful. Chapter 17 (19 pages) is called
“Catching” and here Sullivan tells how he accompanied a team from
the city health department after 9/11 as they trapped rats to take blood
samples to monitor disease. One of
the team members, Ann Li, really liked the rats. At various times she said, “I
think rats are so underappreciated,” “Rats are the smartest
creatures,” and when they finally catch a rat, “This rat is
beautiful!” They trapped the
rats using live-traps, then anesthetized them with halothane before drawing the
blood. They then allowed the rats
to die under the anesthetic, although one very strong rat overcame the
anesthetic and escaped. The last 7
½ pages of the chapter are about cases of plague in NYC.
Chapter
18 (9 ½ pages) includes some of Sullivan’s observations of rats in
the alley over a few nights, and especially, notes on a rat who had a corkscrew
tail and was noticeably bigger than the other rats. This is the only rat that Sullivan saw
more than once, although he said he could not tell the other rats apart.
So
what is the rest of the book about?
Well, Chapter 1 (4 pages) explains why Sullivan decided to observe rats
and write this book. It’s
partly because he found a painting of wild rats done by Audubon, and partly
because Sullivan shares a liking for areas that rats also like: swamps, dumps,
and alleys.
Chapter
3 (12 pages) is about David E. Davis, whom Sullivan describes as “
Chapter
4 (6 ½ pages) is all about the history of the alley Sullivan chose: Edens Alley.
Chapter 5 (14 ½ pages) covers the history of wild rat
infestations in NYC and reports of wild rats in the newspaper. Chapter 7 (9 pages) is about Jesse Gray,
the founder of the first Harlem Tenants Council. Chapter 9 (9 ½ pages) is about
the history of “ratting” in NYC, where wild rats were caught and
put into arenas so dogs could kill them for entertainment.
Chapter
10 (10 ½ pages) is about the history of garbage in NYC. Chapter 11 (15 ½ pages) is about
exterminators, or pest control operators as they are called now, once they
realized they could only control pests and not completely exterminate
them. This chapter contains a quote
from one of the exterminators who said he had seen on TV a “country in
Chapter
12 (16 pages) is about Sullivan traveling to
I
can’t recommend this book for the average rat lover. I found parts of it interesting, but
other parts are boring, and some are quite grisly. I can only recommend it for someone who
isn’t too squeamish and who wants to read all they can about rats.
Book Review: Animals
and the Afterlife
(This review appeared in the Jan 2004 issue of the Rat Report.)
I was very happy to read this book, which
is well organized and well written.
It is filled with amazing stories of contacts between humans and not
only animals who have passed on, but also animals who are still living. It is hard to maintain skepticism about
life after death, animal communication and the intelligence and spirituality of
animals in the face of so much evidence.
But
the best part of this book is the many stories Kim tells about her
relationships with her rats! The
book is a collection of stories from many different people, most about other
kinds of animals, but woven throughout are Kim’s own stories, most of
which are about rats. These stories
are an absolute joy to read, and I feel that every pet lover who reads this
book will have their eyes opened about rats. Whether Kim meant the book to be a
testimonial about rats or not (and most likely she did!) it paints a most
glowing picture of their nature.
Time after time as I read the book I found tears running down my face. Thank you, Kim for a wonderful book!
Book Review: The Story of Rats
(This review appeared in the
November 2002 issue of the Rat Report.)
This
book, The Story of Rats: Their Impact on
Us, and Our Impact on Them was written by S. Anthony Barnett and published
in
The
blurb about Barnett on the back cover of The
Story of Rats says, “Early in the Second World War, equipped only
with first class honours from
Barnett
explains in his preface that what he attempted in this book was a social
history of human relationships with rats.
The main failing of this book is that he absolutely ignored the fact
that rats are kept as pets! He
didn’t mention it anywhere in the book. I found this to be totally
inexplicable. If his book is
supposed to be about our impact on rats and their impact on us, then it would
make sense to cover this part of our relationship.
I
was also disappointed in the book as a whole because it seemed to me that
Barnett’s general attitude was not respectful or interested in the rats
themselves, but only what society could learn about humans by comparing us to
rats. Maybe this attitude can be
better understood when you see on page 119 that in Barnett’s world of
laboratory research, it was not usual for the rats to be socialized. He makes the comment that socialized
rats “can be highly disconcerting to visitors to one’s laboratory
who are accustomed only to normal
This
would also explain another statement he makes. He says at the end of Chapter 2 that
when some of his lab rats escaped into “the gloomy junk-filled cellars of
a large ill-designed building,” and were later captured and restored to
their cages “they were quite vicious.”
While
the book was meant to be historical, I was also disappointed that he did not
include more recent scientific discoveries about rats, such as the fact that
they laugh, and the brain research that shows rats think about what they want
(some were able to control a machine that gave them water by thought alone.)
Right
from the start you can see Barnett’s approach to rats. Chapter 1, titled “Tales of
Rats,” begins with curses people have used against rats and mice, and
includes subsections titled “Abominations and Horrors” and
“Magic, Sport and Nourishment,” which lists two cookbooks that include
recipes for rat. He does point out
that the horror scene featuring rats in the novel 1984 “has no connection with what rats would actually
do….”
In
Chapter 2, “Naming and Taming,” he says about the Norway rat,
“in its domestic forms it is usually white, or white and
black….” While this is
essentially true, it would have been nice for him to point out that domestic
rats are now bred in a wide variety of colors and patterns, but as I said
before, he makes absolutely no mention of pet or show rats anywhere in the
book.
I’m
sure you won’t be surprised that Barnett spends most of Chapter 3,
“All Fall Down,” on the plague. The strange thing is that in the 12
pages on this topic, rats are only mentioned once!
In
Chapter 5, “Do Rats Think?” we can see a bit more of
Barnett’s attitude towards rats.
He makes the statement, “Although children cannot be kept like
rats, in cramped and featureless cages….” It’s obviously okay with Barnett
that rats are kept in cramped and
featureless cages. Amazing that he
would believe anything could be learned about rat behavior in that situation.
I
found Chapter 6, “Are Rats Gluttons?” to be the most interesting of
the book. Barnett talks about the
individual eating habits and preferences of different rats and how they can
choose the right supplement when they are deficient in a nutrient. Other interesting topics are social
feeding and social learning.
However, I was surprised that he made no mention of genetic obesity.
In
Chapter 7, “All in their Genes,” there is an apparent mistake as
readers are referred to a previous chapter for an example that I couldn’t
find anywhere.
In
Chapter 8, “Rat Societies,” Barnett makes a strange statement. When talking about how rats chatter
their teeth when fighting he says, “Whether this is a social signal is
doubtful.” I think it’s
clear that tooth chattering is a social signal! He also makes no mention of how rats use
ultrasound. In this chapter he also
says that the domestic rats he studied were always peaceful and non-territorial
and never fought even when he introduced new rats. Now that’s strange!
In
Chapter 9, “Population Explosions,” Barnett makes another strange
statement. He says, “Despite
or because of their strange social interactions, rats have a fabulous capacity
to multiply….” Even
after reading the book I’m not sure why he feels rats have strange social
interactions!
While
I feel that this book is woefully incomplete and biased, it does include some
very interesting information about rats such as the differences between wild
and domestic rats, the interaction of learning with instinct, and how wild rats
avoid poisons and traps. However,
Barnett’s negative attitude towards rats is disturbing for someone who
loves them.
Book Review:
Animal Miracles
(This review appeared in the
December 2001 issue of the Rat Report.)
This
book, Animal Miracles: Inspirational and
Heroic True Stories, is a treasure.
I’ve been meaning to review it for a while, and other things kept
pushing it aside. There is only one
story about a rat in the book, and it is about a wild rat, not a pet rat, but
it is a good story. This wild rat
becomes friends with a miner. The
miner shares his food with the rat and the rat keeps the miner company. One day, the rat became very agitated
and ran up to the miner and then ran away several times. The miner finally realized the rat was
trying to tell him something and followed the rat. Immediately after that, the roof of the
mine where the miner was working collapsed. The rat had saved the miner’s
life!
The
book contains 50 amazing, touching, and truly miraculous stories of animals
helping humans. Most of the stories
feature dogs and cats, but there are also stories about birds, horses, pigs,
cows, dolphins, sea lions, a whale, a monkey, an elk, and even a sea turtle, a
stingray, and a shark. The stories
were collected by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger and published in 1999 by Adams Media
Corporation. This book would be a
wonderful addition to any animal lover’s library.
Book Review: The
Rat: A Perverse Miscellany
(This review appeared in the
February 1998 issue of the Rat Report.)
This
book, collected by Barbara Hodgson (1997, Ten Speed Press), has some
interesting bits, but it is almost all about wild rats and therefore heavily
oriented toward the negative side of rats.
The press release says it is “a compendium of rat facts, rat
fiction, rat lore, and rat art.”
I found very few rat facts in this book. It is basically a collection of quotes
from other books and periodicals, mostly focusing on the image of horror that is
perpetuated in the popular media.
The
book is divided into 11 chapters plus a preface, in which the author describes
some encounters with wild rats she has had during her international
travels. She met her first wild rat
in a hotel room in
But
while Hodgson found wild rats in
The
chapter Rat Talk goes on to discuss the various terms using rat, such as
rat-fink and rat race. One
interesting entry is the word raternity, which was
coined by Michel Dansel in his book Nos Freres les Rats
(Our Brothers the Rats). Raternity describes the relationship between rats which
allows them to communicate survival details such as the appearance of a new
poison. On page 4, there is a list
of “Other rats, real and otherwise:” including the
“Muskrat” and the “Pouched rat,” however Hodgson does
not explain which are real and which aren’t.
The
next chapter, Around the World, is a selection of writings from or about
different countries which mention rats.
The selection for Java says that to encourage the killing of rats, the
government required that people applying for marriage licenses had to supply 25
rat tails. Enterprising Javanese
began to manufacture artificial tails (impossible to tell from the real ones),
so the government began to require 25 rat bodies. The Javanese then began to breed
rats! The entry for
The
next chapter, The Essential Rat, supposedly supplies the “rat
facts,” but much of the information is wrong. For instance, one quote says about the
wild Norway rat: “They cannot vomit and so can eat almost anything. They are almost totally blind and
‘see’ with the hairs on the sides of their bodies.” Although it is true that rats
can’t vomit, this is not why they can eat almost anything! In fact, they must be very careful of
what they eat. And I don’t
know about your rats, but mine seem to be able to see just fine! Hodgson also perpetuates the tooth myth
by saying: “If they didn’t gnaw continually, their incisors would
grow 4″ a year and cause the animal great difficulties.” A drawing in another chapter of what is
supposed to be rat incisors from a U.S. Land Survey shows the “rat”
having 4 incisors on the top!
In
the next chapter, The Fabled Rat, Hodgson lists several familiar stories,
although in most versions, like the City Rat and Country Rat, the rats are
replaced by mice. She describes a
turn-of-the-century children’s book La
Guerre des rats et de grenouilles (The War of the
rats and frogs) which she calls delightful, but a picture of rats stabbing
frogs with knives and spears turned my stomach. I found one interesting entry in this
chapter which belongs in the previous chapter because it is true. In reference to cannibalism, Mr. Bewick, an illustrator from Great Britain, said, “the
skins of such of them as have been devoured in their holes have frequently been
found curiously turned inside out, every part of them being completely
inverted, even to the ends of the toes.” Although the author who quoted Mr. Bewick didn’t quite believe his statement, calling it
alleged, I actually saw this in the lab.
In several cases where rats had been eaten by their cagemates (after
dying of natural causes), the skins were almost always turned inside out,
although I never noticed the toes.
The
next chapter, The Fictional Rat, offers a few more negative quotes, although
Hodgson does mention Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and two other books, Racso and the Rats of NIMH and R-T; Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH,
written by the original author’s daughter, which I didn’t know
about. The next 5 chapters, Gothic
Rats and Other Terrors, The Cinematic Rat, The Four Deadly Sins, Plagues and
Cures, and To Catch a Rat, are pretty much what you might expect. In The Cinematic Rat Hodgson includes
several short synopses of movies in which rats appear, but some of them
don’t give you enough information to let you know exactly how the rats
appear, and whether or not it would be worth watching the movie. The chapter To Catch a Rat is especially
disgusting.
The
final chapter, Rats and Man, includes several interesting bits, including a
photo of a suit of armor for a rat and a quote from a book called The Rat
Report! (apparently “written” by a lab rat.) Another quote I liked was “A rat
is unimpressed by talk of a just peace, he recognizes no flag and his ideology
is food. Food! Food!” But
right below this was a poem called Rat Jelly which was one of the most disgusting
entries in the book.
The bibliography is extensive,
and I will probably try to locate some of the books Hodgsen
quotes from, but I wish she had included short synopses of the books (like the
movies) so you would know if it was worth trying to get the book. I found the index very limited, listing
mostly authors or book titles, with no entries for topics such as
“teeth” or “tails.”
There are a few interesting
illustrations in the book, as well as many of dead rats, rats being killed, or
rats attacking people. All in all,
this is not the best book for someone who loves rats. If you find it in your bookstore, I
suggest you take a look at the suit of armor on page 105, but buy the book at
your own risk!
Book Review:
Tatti Wattles, A Love Story
(This review appeared in the
April 1997 issue of the Rat Report.)
This
book written by performance artist Rachel Rosenthal is a delight. Published in 1996 by Smart Art Press, it
is hardback and has 61 pages.
Rachel tells how she rescued a young rat who she later named Tatti Wattles from another performance artist’s
display and fell in love. Tatti Wattles became her constant companion, going
everywhere with her and even participating in some of her performances. “Tatti
had great stage presence,” wrote Rachel. “He loved posing for photographers
and videos. He loved being in the
limelight and never hid or presented his backside. All the photos show him, handsome,
looking directly into the camera.
In performance, he always knew where his light was.”
Through
his public appearances Tatti Wattles became a rat
ambassador, making many converts.
Rachel describes so well the various attitudes all we rat lovers have
experienced when sharing our rats with others, from loving acceptance, to
squeamishness, to outright revulsion.
Rachel’s eloquent words describing her loving relationship with Tatti contrasts sharply with the words she uses to descibe the more usual societal opinion of rats--words
we’ve all heard before!
Rachel fills her book with
her personal philosophy about how we should see and interact with animals as
individuals with their own rights, not slaves. She explains how Tatti
Wattles became her closest friend and gave her emotional support during bad
times. She was devastated when Tatti died of heart disease. After his death, she went to a workshop
on shamanism and underwent a shamanistic “journey” where she was
reunited with Tatti and learned that rats were her
Power Animal. Some of these
journeys, which she said taught her a great deal about herself, are illustrated
in color throughout the book. Other
charming black and white drawings show Tatti Wattles
in life. At the end of the book is
a philosophical discussion of the book and Rosenthal’s performance art by
Jacki Apple.
Rachel
has unfortunately included a couple of factual errors in the book. She wrote, “These rodents have no
bones, only cartilage, which explains how they squeeze into the tiniest
apertures.” This is
incorrect. Rats have bones just
like all other mammals. They are
just very flexible! Tatti had overgrown teeth which required periodic trimming. Rachel wrote, “Rodents afflicted
with this abnormality in the wild would grind their teeth down on hard
surfaces. But Tatti
was civilized and had lost all such instincts. He only liked soft food.” Tatti had a
medical problem, either malocclusion or some other problem of the teeth or jaw
that prevented him from eating hard food.
Wild and domestic rats normally grind their teeth together to keep them
the right length, but they can’t do this a medical problem.
Other
than these two mistakes, I have enjoyed this book very much, more so the more I
read it. Rachel’s writing is
bold and frank. For example,
here’s how she described the young Tatti. “His baby coat was sleek and
black, and he had a white belly, white socks, and balls almost as big as his
body.” Her story is
filled with observations and feelings that only another true rat lover will
recognize and understand. This book
is truly a poem of love for a rat, and for all rats, and worth having in any
rat lover’s library.
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