Oh, Rats!

I’ve always liked mice and rats. When I was young, I would set out traps to catch the occasional mouse that got inside my building, but I only did it because of all the warnings I’d heard indicting rodents as prime vectors of disease and as prone to overpopulating whole cities. I’m sure those warnings are legitimate. Nevertheless, every time I put down a trap, I’d root for the mouse to find a way of avoiding or defeating the contraption.  

Then came the night that put a stop to my using that method of control forever. I heard a trap in a corner of my kitchen snap. Afraid of what mangled little creature I’d find – dead, or worse yet, still alive - I went to look. Sure enough, there was a little mouse in the trap, thankfully already quite dead, the bar of the trap heavily on its neck. But as I started to reach down to pick up the trap for disposal, a second mouse darted out of a small gap at the door sill. It rushed practically under my feet and nuzzled its companion. Then it tried to leverage the trap onto its shoulders and drag it away! It tried a variety of hunching, contorting positions in order to hoist one end of the trap onto its back. It actually did succeed in moving the trap an inch or two towards the safety of that escape hatch by the door. It tried to effect this rescue for over a minute, persisting even after I stomped my foot to put an end to its pitifully futile attempt. Finally, it too realized the futility of its efforts, and disappeared permanently back under the door sill.

What a display of bravery and altruism! What superior willingness to help a companion, even in the face of danger from a monstrous creature a thousand times its size! I thought of a date my mother told me she’d had with a wealthy upperclassman from college. They had gone sailing on his family yacht. As my mother looked over the railing at the bounty of the blue water skimming under the boat – her date had cautioned her. He said, “If you fall over, I’ll throw you a life jacket, but that’s as far as I’ll go. I won’t go in after you. If you fall over, you’re on your own.”

Well, I guess the man was being sensible in a way, but hardly chivalrous. How much more gallant that little mouse had been, risking its own life so willingly for a fellow mouse.

I’ve read rats have been known to act the same way, especially when it comes to rescuing individuals they can identify as mates or offspring. Plus of course there is the high intelligence demonstrated by rats and mice, the quality that has caused them to be impressed into service for decades in labs around the world where they serve as stand-ins for humans in endless tests.

So all in all, rodents can be admirable. After witnessing that especially courageous display of first-responder effort on the part of the mouse, I never used another snap-trap to capture one. I turned exclusively to Have-A-Hart traps. That often made quite a chore for me. When I’d hear the Have-A-Hart trap snap in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm – Oh No! I’d sometimes keep the mouse in the trap until the weather let up a little, but I was reluctant to keep it isolated and hungry in the trap for too long. (The mice never seemed to eat further into the dollop of peanut butter or any other food in the trap once they’d been caught. They seemed to lose all appetite with the stress of the situation, just as humans don’t usually feel like eating anything while waiting in the Doctor’s office.) So the capture of a mouse often meant that I would have to go out in all kinds of inclement weather, and always in the dead of night when I wouldn’t be seen. I’d drive the mouse to one of several likely places I had scoped out for these occasions.

One of my favorite depositories was an old abandoned garage in a distant neighborhood – unconnected with any currently occupied human dwelling. The garage was falling apart, which meant it had lots of gaps into which a mouse could scurry. Rarely did a mouse head for any of those gaps though. When I’d open the door of the trap, most of them would perversely head the other way, in the direction of the highest snow drift in sight. (Maybe not so intelligent after all?) Well, I’d done all I could. I had to have faith that the mouse would double back and find the inviting holes in the garage once I’d left the scene.

And so it went. I had to smile ruefully at myself for undertaking these cold winter excursions, these sorties down dark alleys in the middle of the night. I thought if I expanded my impulse to be helpful to rodents, that impulse perhaps ought to take some less strenuous form. I saw there was a chapter of the “Rat Fancier’s Society” holding meetings in my area. However, as I looked over the membership on the Society’s Meet-Up page online, I began to have some doubts about joining. A number of the members were clearly into the “Goth” scene and showed themselves holding their pet rats as part of their Goth accoutrements. I didn’t know much about Goth enthusiasms. I’d never watched Twilight or gotten a tattoo of a skull on me anywhere. Nevertheless, I thought I’d give the club a try. I clicked that I’d be at their next meeting, to be held at one of the few big bricks-and-mortar bookstores that was still hanging in there in the face of online competition.

When I got to the bookstore the following week, I saw that a whole section of its first floor had been turned into a sort of Parisienne café setting. All sorts of drinks and noshes were available from the counter, and different sized tables were deployed around the space, clearly to accommodate different-sized groups. Apparently a lot of Meet-Ups were held here. I saw most of the tables were occupied by different clutches of people huddled in earnest confab over some obviously shared interest.

It struck me then that I had a problem. I had no idea which of these groups might be the Rat Society. Unless one of the Goth members showed up, I’d have no way of even guessing. I had no cell phone and even if I had, I hadn’t thought to take the number of the group’s organizer. So I went off into a corner of the café and sat at a small table, waiting for a sign. Nothing presented itself.

Finally, when it got to be about ten minutes past the meeting hour, I knew I would have to take action or else risk missing the whole meeting as it took place somewhere right in front of me. So I got up and started to circulate inquiringly. The word “Fancier” utterly escaped me for the moment. So as I leaned down to discreetly address what looked like an officiating member of each group in turn - I had no choice but to use the very un-euphemistic synonym. I whispered, “Excuse me. Are you with the Rat Lover’s Society?”

Well, you can guess what a reaction that drew. My question triggered shock, commiseration at having so revolting a fetish, hilarity, and recoil. Sometimes my question elicited elaborations of the inevitable “No, we’re not!” answer. The head of one group gasped, “Oh, no! Rats are exactly what we DON’T want to see any of. We’re quilters. We do everything to keep rats AWAY from our work!” This emphatic repulse started a chain of recollection in the group. Another member recalled how she’d peered into her cedar chest where she’d stored some of her most precious quilts – only to see that the quilts had been gnawed into tatters, obviously by some incursion of a rodent or of rodents. Upon examining the chest, she saw the small separation in two pieces of its wood that had allowed the invasion. Years of work ruined!

This tragic narrative triggered the memories of other group members as they recounted their own frustrating battles in their war with rodents. The topic drifted away from strict concern with quilts. Another woman at the table recalled her shock at finding the outsized, hand-made hemp hammock she’d lugged all the way back from Mexico – completely chewed away. Again, rodents the obvious culprits! (Although I privately thought moths might also have been implicated in some of these crimes.) As one-by-one, the women in this group were inspired to tell their own war stories in the unending battle against rodents – I myself drifted away – on to the next table.

At this next table I approached, I triggered an even more emphatic convulsion of disgust and autobiography. When I once again posed the question sotto voce, “Pardon me, but are you with the Rat Lover’s Society?” – my informant emitted a loud, bawdy guffaw. “God, NO!” she spat. “My ex was a real rat, and I can tell you – there’s no love lost there!” Turning to what she obviously felt were likely to be her compatriots in suffering on this score, she launched into a description of some of her ex-husband’s unsavory sexual practices.

Having extracted this final “No!” vote, it seemed I had polled all the possible tables in the bookstore. I retreated to sit for a few more minutes in a corner of the cafe, just in case an actual Rat Fancier (ah, now, too late, I remembered the more euphemistic term) should show up. When none did, I looked around the bookstore for a bit and then wandered back out into what was then solid night.

When I got home, I checked the Rat Fanciers’ page and found the meeting had been cancelled. Not having a cell phone really does put me incommunicado. But I took the chance to look more closely at some of the pictures that members of the Society had posted – pictures of themselves posing with their pets. One picture in particular caught my eye. It showed the aftermath of a birthday party that had obviously been thrown in honor of the woman’s large black “fancy rat.” There was a slightly nibbled little birthday cake with a now-quenched single candle stuck into it. And there was Damien, the birthday boy, lying asleep in sated bliss on a purple velvet cushion on its owner’s lap. The rat had a tiny, pointed wizard’s hat on, tied under its chin. You’d think a rat wouldn’t tolerate such a thing, but it apparently had found being the object of such dolly dress-up to be a small price to pay for the lavish lifestyle it enjoyed in return.

The day had indeed produced something to laugh at. Whenever I think back on my hour circulating around, unctuously asking people if they were “Rat Lovers,” I literally LOL. But then I almost always flip moods, thinking of some of the philosophical implications of the existence of those few, those lucky few who enjoy the patronage of members of the Rat Fanciers’ Society. While these rats are lying in luxurious splendor on velvet cushions – there are the vast majority of rats in the world, being hounded, beaten, poisoned into miserable deaths at the end of short, miserable lives. And really, there’s no appreciable difference between the two sets of rats. The celebrated, cosseted rat did nothing to deserve his loving treatment. By the same token, the rat who is being smashed under the shovel of a city worker did nothing to deserve his fate.

These considerations always lead me to recall the disparate kinds of treatment I’d seen given to another species – to ducks. I was the guest at the home of a pen-pal in rural Missouri for a week. The man turned out to have some decided likes and dislikes, some aggressive intolerances. One of his most obvious “pet peeves” was the tapping behavior of a wild duck on his acreage. The duck would appear a few times a day and tap with its beak on the glass of the man’s French doors. It would tap for a minute or two at a time, seeming to solicit either just some playful human companionship, or else the more mundane necessity of some food. Either way, I found the duck’s wistful appearance at the window to be very appealing.

My host took a completely different view of the duck. Every time the duck appeared (which I did not consider to be intrusively often), the man would roil in rage, yelling dumbfounding obscenities. Finally, on the last day of my visit, when the duck appeared outside the windows, the man had had ENOUGH. He rushed into his barn, grabbed a hatchet, and started to pursue the animal around his yard in a froth of fury. I cringed at the horror show in front of me. Instead of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I seemed to be threatened with witnessing the Missouri Hatchet Massacre.

Fortunately, the duck sensed its lack of a welcome in time and ran for cover. It tucked itself so far under the man’s porch that there was no way the fellow would crawl under and get it. But my host assured me that “the next time,” he’d make sure the duck didn’t get away. I was glad I was leaving before what seemed would be an inevitable bloody butchery.

Again, this scene conjured in my mind the stark, unjustified contrasts in treatment that exist in the world. Just before I’d come to this man’s house, I’d stopped in Memphis where I’d visited the Peabody Hotel. There, sharp at 11:00, I’d been in the crowd of tourists who come from all over the world to see the “March of the Ducks.” Some specially favored ducks come down from their palatial roosts on the Hotel roof, step off the elevator, and parade around the fountain in the center of the Hotel lobby – ducks in a row. An appreciative wave of “Ooohs” and Aaaahs” and picture-snapping runs through the crowd as these ducks strut their stuff. When the March is over, some of the ducks waddle back in military precision into the elevator that whisks them back up to their penthouse suites. Some stay behind and swim in the fountain.

These admired Peabody ducks are no better than the duck in the back yard of my Missouri host. If anything, that wild duck seemed more personable and intelligent than the trained ducks of Memphis. It was sheer luck that destined one to painful extermination and another to the cheers of multitudes.

All of which seems to me to further put the lie to the assurances of so many of Oprah’s guests and of Oprah herself – the fatuous assurances that we can all be anything we want to be, that we can all “become” what we dream. In the United States and many other democratic countries, people do have a large amount of self-determination. To a great extent, they are responsible for their own circumstances in life. However, there is still a large measure of fate that is beyond anyone’s control. One gets struck by lightning; one standing just six inches away doesn’t get hit. One gets caught in the cross-fire of a gang gun fight; one standing six inches away is safe. And so on through car accidents, the sweep of a wave at sea, the direction in which a deadly germ wafts, etc., etc.

Most people recognize how the luck of the draw has determined people’s fate in that kind of split-second event. But what people less often seem to acknowledge is how much of one’s life is determined by the attitudes of the surrounding people in power. While a healthy white male in 1850 in Virginia might have had some chance of realizing an aspiration to be President of the United States – a black slave in the same neighborhood would have had no such chance. While a Jewish man in 1940 in Los Angeles might have had a chance of realizing an aspiration to be a movie mogul – a Jewish man in 1940 in Auschwitz would have had almost no such chance. All of the positive-thinking guests holding forth on TV shows are talking twaddle to people in such circumstances.

Indeed, the “Anyone can succeed” messages of motivational speakers and life coaches can be worse than twaddle. If their message is that anyone can realize his or her dreams, then they must be implicitly laying blame on all the abject victims of others’ rampant cruelty. If the Jewish man in Auschwitz didn’t realize his dream of producing feature films – if indeed he didn’t survive through to the end of the week – it must be his own fault, according to these motivational gurus. The Jewish man must have failed to think positively enough. Or he must have failed to properly attune himself to the Universal Energy Force.

Again, in democratic societies, most people do have a lot of latitude to pursue any dream, to bring any talent they have to fruition. However, even in the most freedom-friendly societies, conditions can change with alarming speed. All the myriad possibilities afforded to individuals in pockets of the society or in the society as a whole, can be reduced to the single laser-point dreams of dictators, or simply of people in power who have adamantine prejudices and aversions. Evading the cruel impulses of those in authority can be impossible, as demonstrated through the ages by the deaths of millions upon millions of those caught in wars, holocausts, and genocides, or just in the sights of someone for whom an individual’s life has no value.

We are all in danger of becoming sitting ducks – or rats in a trap.