Rodent Reception WHY RATS MAKE GREAT PETS by Tara Heberling photo by Juline Chevalier Rats belong to that unfortunate, deeply misunderstood class of creatures. Like snakes, for example. Snakes are a vital link in the ecosystem. They are also really cool. (Can you completely unhinge your jaw and swallow a rabbit whole? And then not eat again for a month? I thought not.) Due to the alleged behavior of one snake at the dawn of time (and it hasn't even been proven), all snakes are abhorred because they supposedly caused the fall of man. I think it also has something to do with the fact that they have no limbs -- something alien and frightening to us bipeds. So it is with rats. Think of all the negative uses of the word "rat." The most famous one is, of course, "you dirty rat," but we also have such phrases as the verbal phrase "to rat someone out," or the adjective "ratty" as in, "my ratty old sweater has many holes." Rats are considered to be dirty, disease-carrying, mean, and destructive. Since I have owned pet rats, I have learned a great deal about human prejudice. I remember quite clearly the lovely summer day I brought Nelly home. The year before, I had acquired a parakeet. When I went away to school, I left her in my parents' care, assuming they were more responsible than I. Ha ha. Sometime in the spring, my bird heard the call of the wild, chewed a hole in the kitchen window screen, and resigned her position as the family parakeet. I think she probably wanted to find a better job as an eagle or something. It's a good thing I was too dumb to figure out how to turn the doorknob to the front door when I was a little kid, isn't it? Anyway, they were feeling mighty guilty about losing my bird, and so I figured pretty much any pet I brought home would be welcomed with open arms -- even though I am gone for over half the year -- if for no other reason than horrible parental remorse. I had always wanted to get a pet rat; I had a friend who kept one and I had heard they were super smart and quite affectionate. My mother was horrified. My mother, who had weathered gerbils, hamsters, birds galore, a little yappy dog, and about 10,000 goldfish, raised her eyebrows at me with that incredulous, "You're going to wear that?" look and said, "You're kidding, right?" I really could not understand what the problem was, but she got over it pretty quickly. Within a matter of days, my mom realized that rats share her affinity for snacking between meals. Maybe she felt less guilty about eating a handful of grapes if the rat had one too (since a grape is almost as big as its head). Anyway, the rat cage found a spot where the bird cage used to be. I have two rats, Dürty Nelly and Awful Arthur. I thought these names were appropriate, due to the general consensus about rats, though nobody at home understands the allusions. When I introduce them to someone, I usually bring Nelly out first, since she is less rat-like. While Arthur is brown, agile, and extremely inquisitive, Nelly is white and tan, and rather chubby. Since I had all summer to raise her and spend the majority of most days with her riding around the house in a pocket or on a shoulder, she is very sociable as well. (My mother claims that Nelly sits in a different corner of her cage and dejectedly sticks her nose through the bars and lies there for hours on end when she hasn't been played with in a few days.) When I bring out Nelly, if I haven't told the friend/relative/whoever ahead of time that Nelly is a rat, the conversation goes something like this: "Oooooh! Cute! What is she, a chinchilla? A hamster?" "No, Nelly is a rat." "UGH! Look at that ugly tail. Eew. You're crazy." Let's examine that conversation. How do you get from "oooh cute" to "ugh" in less than ten words? It's a labeling crisis, as the sociologists would say. I've made the mistake of calling my sweet mammalian friend a negatively-connotated "rat," thus violating all kinds of social norms, or something like that. Nowhere was the labeling idea made more clear to me than during my trip to a children's museum. I kept the cage covered at first and went around the room, asking the children what they thought about rats. The words "dirty," "smelly," "ugly," and "stinky" seemed to come up a lot, between giggles. When I pulled the cover off the cage, however, a collective "oooooh" filled the room. When I asked if anyone would like to pet Nelly, everyone did. They immediately wanted all kinds of explanations; what is her tail for? (Temperature control, balance.) What does she eat? (Anything, rats are omnivores.) What does she like to do? (Climb, jump, make nests out of paper, steal my dirty socks and sleep on them.) I have a feeling many children went home that afternoon pestering their parents with, "Can we get a rat? Can we?" After the older children had left, a toddler somehow wandered into the room. He exuberantly made his way to the cage with that kneeless toddler gambol and joyously proclaimed, "Kitty!" "No no, honey," his mother said. "Those are rats." "Goggie woof woof?" he asked, wide-eyed and not quite understanding. "Rats," she repeated. "Kitty kitty kitty kitty," he sang, patting the bars of the wire cage. Then he said something else, which I didn't understand (not speaking fluent toddler). "No no, honey. Rats don't drink juice. Juice is for children. Rats drink water, see?" his mother said. She turned to me and, somewhat embarrassed I think, said, "He likes them. He wants to share his juice with them." I was delighted by this, of course. Here was a little boy who hardly came up to my knees, and he had just resolved the entire problem of human prejudice in a few words of preschool babble. Ah, but wouldn't the universe be a better place if the world leaders got together and shared their juice a couple of times a week? Not caring if who they were sharing with were kitties, "goggies," or rats, but just generally liking them? Obviously, and this has been said before, children must be taught their hatred. I don't think any parent in that room sat her child down on a Saturday afternoon and said, "Rats are dirty. Rats are ugly. We don't like rats." They just absorbed this knowledge from the world around them. I am not implying that your parents were narrow-minded and sat you down for instruction in the fine points of prejudice. I am saying, however, that if we ever want to live in a truly free society, we have to be careful about what our children absorb. We have to let them explore and find out for themselves without us telling them what we think is "the truth." Once those children got up close to Nelly's tail, and looked at her tiny scales and sensitive hairs, unlike anything they had seen before, once they looked at her little front paws, with its fingers just like the fingers they see on their own hands every day, they realized that this creature was both different from and similar to them. Different, but still amazing. Similar, but still not the same. In gently petting her, they learned respect. In a perfect world, we would all simply want to share our juice.

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