MIXED COMPANY

By ANNE K JACQUES
Part 3.


RATTUS NORVEGICUS

It was in the mid-eighteenth century that Rattus-norvegicus first set foot in
England, arriving, it is said, in the French slavers which called at English
ports on their way to the sugar plantations of the West Indies or the cotton
fields of America. The name bestowed upon it was `the Hanoverean rat', which
might have been a sly political joke, for the Royal House of Hanover was very
far from popular at that time and for quite a long time yet to come.
Until quite recently it was generally accepted as an historical fact that
the brown rat did not arrive in Europe until the early eighteenth century. It
was stated that they migrated from Mongolia in two great waves, the first in
1727 and the second in 1740. They were reported to have swum the Volga by the
million, many drowning on the way and many more dying after landing from
exhaustion and starvation. The causes of these massive migrations were
earthquakes and climatic calamities in their native territory. From the west
bank of the Volga, the survivors were said to have fanned out over all Europe
with astonishing rapidity. However, this report is now very much discounted, and
Mr S.A. Barnett, one of the foremost `rat men' of recent years and a zoologist
at the University of Glasgow, states that it is now proved that Simon Pallas, on
whose book `Zoographica Rosso – Aseatica' the theory was based, was not born
until 1741. The great Volga swim which Pallas witnessed near Astrakhan must have
in fact occurred between the years 1750 and 1760. The rats then observed were
swimming from west to east and not east to west. Mr Barnett says there is little
doubt about the fact that a couple of great rat invasions happened in the years
1727 and 1740, but they were very far from being the first invasions of Europe
by the brown rat. He considers there must have been numerous small migrations
over many centuries which attracted little or no attention. The differences
between the black and the brown rat are not spectacular and the average person
would not be impressed by them. He also makes the point that although rats can
travel very quickly over short distances, really long journeys are quite
contrary to their known modes of procedure. The generally progress in stages,
resting periodically to recuperate and reorganise.
These newcomers could then thieve and multiply under conditions which
would be anathema to the black rat. They found the filthy ports and cities quite
congenial habitations. They appreciated the house middens, refuse tips and
slaughter yards, could rest snugly in a dung hill and make a hearty meal of
offal, hides or rotting bones. They were in fact just low-class city slickers.
The `old English' may have been a bit of a snob, but the two types did not enjoy
each other's company and preferred to settle in different localities. In an
astonishingly short time after their arrival, every port and city was infested
by the brown rats, and at the end of the eighteenth century all England was
brown-rat territory, and the black rat was seldom encountered. People concluded
that the big newcomer had fought with and eradicated his smaller predecessor.
This was a very reasonable assumption, based on human standards of
behaviour. Humans would no doubt have announced that this was their `promised
land' and proceeded to liquidate the native population, as the Israelites set
about eliminating the Canaanites. However, that is not the way of the rat.
Contrary to generally held opinions, rats do not kill rats with anything like
the enthusiasm with which man slaughters his fellow man. Killing amongst rats
occurs very rarely and only under conditions of acute stress, when all else
fails. Their usual procedure is to institute a form of peaceful apartheid and
separate development. The stronger group generally `corners' the best food
supplies and the weaker group prudently contrives to make other arrangements.
When the brown rats became dominant, the black rats took to the road and headed
for their old haunts out of town, where life once so good, only to find that in
real life `paradise lost' is seldom followed by `paradise regained'. Their
numbers quickly reduced and soon the black rat was a rarity in England and the
newcomer thrived and multiplied as the wicked often do.

In the early years of the nineteenth century the tithe barns were so overrun
by ravenous brown rodents that the churches were suffering considerable loss of
wealth, so the office of `pest controller' was added to the duties of church
wardens, who paid a bounty of threepence a bundle for rats' tails. (At
seed-sowing time, sparrows' masks were similarly paid for out of church funds!)
When the churches received grants of land and property to compensate for the
abolition of the tithe system, the duties of pest controllers were taken over by
the lay bodies. `Rat and Sparrow Clubs' were started, sponsored as a rule by the
local publicans and `count nights' were held regularly in the `local'. They were
quite convivial occasions and a few such clubs still functioned in the south of
England in the 1960s.
Writing of the early days of the twentieth century, Sir Phillip Gibbs
recalls that the hotels and warehouses along the Thames Embankment were so
heavily infested with brown or common rats that the London City Council used to
appoint official rat-catchers. (Today they would be called `rodent operatives'.)
They worked by night, catching the rats by netting them, then popping them alive
into sacks. Sir Phillip says that the men with their rat bags were a familiar
sight in the early morning streets; each bag might hold some 800 rats. Not
infrequently these were sold at 4d a piece to sportsmen in areas where rats were
less abundant, for in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ratting was a
popular sport amongst Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates and gambling on the
ratting prowess of local fox-terriers was arranged at country pubs and
fairgrounds.


To club members - I was given a copy of extracts of MIXED COMPANY which
contained the pages of information about rodents only. For a copy of the
complete version of the book MIXED COMPANY by Anne K Jacques, please visit the
following web-sites to make your enquiries –
New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society
http://www.nzavs.org.nz/
New Zealand Vegetarian Society
http://www.ivu.org/nzvs/
Royal New Zealand SPCA
http://www.rspcanz.org.nz/
Yours sincerely Rebekah Blackwolf Mitchell-Matthews
Club founder.