A rat: ‘We can no longer live as rats: we know too much’

‘They lift their twitching noses into the air, then lift their front paws up from the ground, and finally rise up and sit.’ Illustration: Granger/Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

“You must go to the rats,” the Great Owl tells Mrs Frisby in the Rats of Nimh.

Mrs Frisby, a mouse, needs help: her son is sick and she has to move out of her house at the edge of a field, because the field will soon be ploughed.

“The rats on Mr Fitzgibbon’s farm have – things – ways – you know nothing about. They are not like the rest of us,” the Great Owl says (hoots). “They are not, I think, even like most other rats.”

But most rats are, of course, like no other. Most rats, like most people, try to distinguish themselves. “Rats are genetically very similar to humans, even more closely related to us than cats or dogs are,” the National Fancy Rat Society says, driving home the similarity of the fancied to us, the fanciers, “They’re curious, intelligent, trainable, omnivorous, social, and eat their food sitting on their haunches, grasping it with their tiny front feet.”

The NFRS owes its existence to a woman named Mary Douglas who, in 1901, convinced the National Mouse Club to admit her rat to an exhibition. It won best in show. (“The judge was one Walter Maxey, a man who is widely known as the father of the mouse fancy, as Mary was later known as the mother of the rat fancy,” the NFRS history page says. Among the society’s current leaders is a woman with the surname Feline.) Rat fanciers used to tie ribbons around the necks of their pets. Charming!

In Australia, rats learned, in two years, how to kill cane toads, eat their hearts and carve out their organs with “surgical precision”, a scientist told Guardian Australia’s Naaman Zhou, a reporter committed to uncovering the (beautiful) truth about rats (and Ratatouille). Cane toads have poisonous gallbladders: the rats removed these. Using their miniature hands and pointy claws, they peeled off the poisonous skin and ate the thigh muscle. (The secret at the heart of The Secret of Nimh, the eerie, reverent movie version of the book: “We can no longer live as rats: we know too much.”)

The film Ratatouille is about a rat. It is also, naturally, about becoming an artist. “You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work,” says Auguste Gusteau, a human chef; and Remy, the main character/rat listens.

The New York Times said the film was “a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film”.

If you want to make a portrait of an artist, then, too, “You must go to the rats”, natural emissaries, natural vessels for a story of the pursuit of perfection. Except, I would argue, in the case of poetry. Poets are confounded by rats and must resort to prose to survive. Here is Matthew Sweeney:

I walked along Rue du Faubourg du Temple on the way to Belleville and I stopped at a shop selling rat poison. To my astonishment and my amusement they had a window full of stuffed rats, including four small rats standing round a table, playing cards. I liked that very much.

When I was eight, I had two pet rats. I can’t remember their names. I remember their pink wax flower ears, the way one would crawl up the sleeve of my pyjamas while I watched The Simpsons. Its cold, bony, sentient tail falling out: “And the way when you put them on your shoulder their awful tail curls around the back of your neck”, a friend tells me when we reveal to each other that both of us owned pet rats (I’d deny it to almost anyone else). Pet rats and our names written on a grain of rice inside a tiny glass vial on black cord, bought from a market.

And how when you approach their cage, or they are curious, they lift their twitching noses into the air, then lift their front paws up from the ground, and finally rise up and sit, the size and shape of a pear, on their back legs.

Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a memoir for Scribner Australia

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