 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Rats
By Robert Sullivan
Granta $29.95
 By trying to get up close and personal with creatures that are notoriously difficult to approach, Robert Sullivan was destined to fall short of his sub-title's claim to have spent a year living with the rats of New York City.
Although he peered for hours through infrared glasses at rodents scavenging for food scraps, he was unable to see them doing the things for which they are legendary. Mating, for instance.
'If they are not eating, then rats are usually having sex... Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day... One pair of rats has the potential of 15,000 descendants in a year.'
In the light of such statistics, and other rat-trivia about the strength of their teeth and jaws (they can chew through steel), and of course their role in the Great Plague, Sullivan would have done better to stick to the facts, which are quirky enough, and keep himself out of the story.
Yet the book is a good read and filled with unusual characters, such as Irish-born Kit Burns, who staged events in Manhattan where dogs fought caged rats, put in fifty at a time. Spectators crammed around a wooden-walled pit to see dogs, ferrets, weasels and even men (expected to bite the rats' heads off) set against the rodents.
His enemy was Henry Bergh, who founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals, a wealthy, erudite six-footer who prowled New York in pursuit of animal abusers.
In late 1870, after a drawn-out legal campaign, Bergh got his man and the rats of New York got back to concentrating on how to survive in the urban jungle.
Since then, private contractors and city exterminators have sought to trap and poison rats, and destroy habitat.
The 'superstar of the rodent control industry', Bobby Corrigan, switched his university major from oceanography to rat control and never looked back: 'Just Bobby Corrigan's photos alone - of rat burrows, of greasy rat trails along walls and in ceilings, or rats peering nearly unseen from secret places - are enough to impress even the modest students of rats, and they would make a great wildlife calendar if people used photos of dead-grass-covered strips along a broken city sidewalk or of splotches of rodent faeces in calendars.'
Unsurprisingly, he concludes that rats will always be with us, whatever our revulsion and however unwelcome their presence.
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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