Sullivan: Rats

From Scienticity

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Robert Sullivan, Rats : Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. New York : Bloomsbury, 2004. 242 pages with notes (no index).

When I saw this book on the library bookshelf, its title immediately attracted my attention. Here, I thought, with a title like that it either has to be a very bad book or a very good book. Fortunately, it turned out to be a very good book that I'm happy to have read. I agree, the title sounds a bit clinical, but I think the spirit of the words is one of high-toned irony rather than ponderous scholarship. Sullivan's writing itself is evocative, poetic, and very readable.

In the spirit of previous generations of naturalist-adventurers, our author set out one evening to begin a year-long observation of the secret life of rats, specifically Rattus norvegicus, the so-called Norwegian rat. His laboratory was an alley not far from the location of the World Trade Towers, an alley situated between a couple of restaurants – and their garbage – and inhabited, he soon discovered, by an extensive colony of rats. He vowed to return to his alley every night for a year.

I kept notes all that summer, and after a while, I found the alley, aside from its stench, to be a pleasant place, a scene for a kind of rat-related meditation, a place that never ceased to be novel. I looked forward to my visits there, in fact. I merely needed to take a few moments at the start of each evening to acclimate myself to the smell. When I first began observing, I was happy, after just a few minutes of intense, eye-aching scrutiny, to merely see a rat, any rat. But after a few days, I was able to spot rats quickly. Like the birder who returns over and over to the same woods, I grew comfortable in Edens Alley, accustomed.

Once the rats were out in the alley, they moved quickly—sniffing, licking, nibbling, walking easily around empty, beat-up rat poison dispensers, then galloping off in impressive bursts along the cobblestones. I noticed early on that a rat would stick its head into a garbage bag for a number of seconds. I counted off seconds as a rat drank water from a thimble-size puddle in the nooks of the cobblestones: six. I wondered what proportion of their required two ounces of water a day these six seconds represented—like any time-rich nature-watching endeavor, observations beget more and more questions. On another occasion early on, I took a video camera to the alley and filmed a rat running. I expected to see a kind of skittering, a spidery or crablike crawl. But when I analyzed the tape, I was amazed to see that the rat was almost galloping: the hind legs pushing the front legs up and forward, resulting in an elegant midair arch of the rat's body. Given the darkness of the alley, it is difficult for me to say for certain, but it seems likely from the rat-running tape that all of the rat's legs are in the air at some point in the typical rat gallop. I would bet on it.

As Sullivan learned about his rats, the reader learns about rats more generally. The author's contemplations range wide in the best tradition of the extended essay, and he delves cogently into all manner of rat-related topics, from a history of infestations and the discovery of rats' associate with plague, to the matter of extermination, how, by whom, and to what extent it's possible. I was impressed that Sullivan maintained his literary tone without sacrificing scientific accuracy or avoiding possible science moments.

Plague, which we associate with widespread death in the Middle Ages in Europe and maybe imagine has disappeared or is no longer a threat, is still with us, still a threat.

The Centers for Disease Control's concern with plague in New York City has to do with the use of plague as a biological weapon, which stems in part from the Japanese's use of the disease as a biological weapon during World War II. At that time, Shiro Ishii, a general and a doctor, led a special biological warfare research unit, called Unit 731. Unit 731 worked in Manchuria, where outbreaks of plague had occurred in 1910, 1920, and 1927. The general was interested in plague as a weapon because of its ability to create casualties out of proportion with the amount of bacteria necessary to disseminate the disease. Also, plague could be used militarily in such a way as to make it appear like a natural-occurring outbreak. Initially, General Ishii's unit had difficulty devising a way to drop plague bacillus from airplanes; the bacillus died by the time it hit the ground because of air pressure and high temperatures. He next infected human fleas with the plague, in hopes that they would infect humans and even rats, so as to prolong the epidemic. He attempted to spray fleas from compressed-air containers, which was not successful. He eventually built clay bombs and filled them with infected fleas and dropped them, which worked. Eighty percent of the fleas survived. He experimented on humans, and in these experiments, Ishii determined that if ten healthy people are in a room infested with twenty plague-bearing fleas per square meter, four will die of plague. (Anthrax is more likely to kill someone, but the plague will infect more people.) It is thought that the Japanese used plague as a weapon several times in China during World War II. After a plane flew over Changde, a city in the Hunan province, people began dying of the plague. One of the clues that has led plague expert to believe that the outbreaks were caused by humans was that the rats only began dying in the city two months after humans began dying. After the war, Unit 731's human experiments were made public; members of the unit had practiced vivisection on humans. General Ishii was never tried for war crimes. On the contrary, a deal was made in which he donated his records to the United States government—Ishii's records included fifteen thousand slides of specimens from approximately five hundred human cases of diseases that had been caused by biological weapons, including the plague and anthrax. He retired as a respected medical man. [pp. 176—177]

The author's tone is not too clinical, not too distant. He tried for empathy, tried to understand as well as he could what the rats are doing and why and what drives them, but he didn't go overboard. He didn't elevate rats to some misunderstood ideal, nor did he denigrate rats to gain literary points, nor did he use his topic as an occasion for cheap humor or some such. No, he took his challenge seriously, and considered his topic seriously but with good humor. The results is fascinating, informative, and enjoyable.

-- Notes by JNS