The Year of the Rat

In recognition of the Chinese New Year, my next few posts are going to be all about rats. The rat is the first of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, and people born in the year of the rat are supposed to possess the qualities of creativity, honesty, generosity, ambition, a quick temper and wastefulness. I was not born in the year of the rat, but I find it fascinating that the Chinese, as well as other Eastern cultures, hold the rat in such high regard when it has been thoroughly reviled in most Western cultures. Because the truth of the matter is that there is much more to the rat than their depiction as filthy, thieving, disease-carrying pests.

I could almost write a book on all the things that I find fascinating about rats, but most of that information is written about elsewhere. Instead, I will simply share what I find to be a few of the most amazing facts about rats:

1. Rats Laugh

Despite what people see in movies and TV shows, rats do not run around everywhere squeaking. The only time that rats make noises audible to the human ear is when they are angry or in pain. Normal rat communication takes place in the ultrasonic range, and they are not extremely vocal creatures. However, using special equipment, scientists discovered that rats make short, high-pitched "chirping" noises during playful social interactions with other rats or with people. They also found that rats are ticklish in the same way that people are ticklish; they have sensitive areas on their skin that generate more laughter than others. The playfulness, and the laughter that accompanies it is seen more among younger rats, and the tendency to laugh and play declines as rats age, indicating that it is a social construction meant to stimulate joy and good feelings among groups of young rats, much in the same way that children laugh when playing with one another.



2. Rats are Highly Intelligent and Social Animals

Pet rats have been kept since the 19th century, when professional rat-catchers would keep some of the rats they caught for exhibition or fights. When they started breeding the rats, they began to realize that rats were highly intelligent and trainable, so they started selling them as pets. Through years of selective breeding, people eventually bred the domesticated "fancy rat" away from the common sewer rat, but the similarities remain. Rats are social animals who require the company of other rats for health and friendship. They engage in play, mutual grooming, and a complex social hierarchy that dictates their interactions with one another.

In the wild, rats are colony animals that work together to find food, protect their homes, and defend against predators, chief of which is man. However, human beings have to fight constantly to stay one step ahead of the rat. Rats communicate with one another through complex scent trails - a single drop of scent can tell another rat everything about the one that left it, from their age and health to whether the food they were eating was good or poisoned. Rats follow known paths to and from reliable food sources on a daily basis. A trap set where rats are know to travel may catch one, or maybe two, but not before they have warned every other rat that passes that way about the danger. Rat catchers in New York have been known to come across nests that were lined with the shredded remains of rat traps.

Poison is also ineffective because rats have poison testers - one rat eats any new, unmarked food source first and the other ones stand around and watch to see if anything happens to him before deciding whether it's safe to eat or not. This is why the best current rat poisons are blood thinners, because immediate or fast-acting poisons are useless. Poisons and traps are only deterrents, not devices of extermination, and the rats are figuring them out almost as fast as we are designing them.

As human society has evolved, so has rat society. As our cities have grown taller, they have burrowed deeper. They outbreed us like crazy and are way more likely than we are to survive anything we may do to the planet.We will never be rid of rats in the wild, but why would we want to be? We are learning to mitigate much of the damage that can be done by rats, just as they have learned to avoid the harms set against them by us. Any species that intelligent should be respected.

3. And Speaking of Intelligence...

The final item on my list for today is one of the more amazing things I have ever heard. Rats display metacognition - also known as the process of thinking about thinking. In other words, rats are aware of their own thoughts and are capable of using that awareness to guide future decisions. They are the first animal outside of primates that has been found to have this ability. It was discovered through a study that began by asking the rats to define whether a tone that was played was short or long. If they gave the correct answer, they got a large reward, but if they got the wrong answer, they received no reward. However, at the beginning of the test, the rats were given the option of receiving a small reward for opting out of the test. Over the course of the study, it was found that if the rats started having difficulty getting the right answer, they would choose to opt out of the test, thus demonstrating that they recognized when they didn't know the answer to a question. This is a fascinating discovery in the field of neuroscience, and one that I will definitely expound upon in further posts.

Well, since this post is long enough to be a college essay, I'll leave you with this picture.


Tomorrow, I'll introduce you to my rats and talk about why they make such great pets.