Why Everyone Hates Rats: Unpacking Urban Coexistence, Disease, and Human Blame

This episode of Freakonomics Radio delves into the complex and often contentious relationship between humans and rats, particularly focusing on the urban environment of New York City. It begins by highlighting NYC's aggressive anti-rat stance, epitomized by former Mayor Eric Adams's \"rat czar\" initiative and the city's 99-page mitigation plan. The discussion introduces Katy Corradi, the former rat czar, who emphasizes that rats are commensal species, thriving in close proximity to humans due to readily available food and harborage conditions, making sanitation the primary key to pest management. The episode explores the intelligence and adaptability of rats, noting their ability to exploit urban spaces better than almost any other species, and their surprising capacity for empathy and altruism observed in recent research.\n\nThe narrative then shifts to the historical and cultural perception of rats. Science journalist Bethany Brookshire, author of \"Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains,\" explains that while people have long disliked rats for consuming food supplies, the association with disease, particularly the Black Death, is a more recent development. However, the episode challenges this widely held belief, presenting research by Nils Christian Stenseth and his colleagues, which suggests that human ectoparasites like body lice and human fleas, rather than rats and their fleas, were more likely responsible for the rapid spread of the Black Death in 14th-century Europe. Economist Ed Glaeser corroborates this, noting that while rats played a role in the third bubonic plague pandemic (19th century onwards), their guilt in the most famous Black Death is largely overstated.\n\nThe podcast further explores the economic and public health impacts of rats, including property damage, the transmission of diseases like leptospirosis, and the potential for novel viruses to jump hosts due to rats' close proximity to humans. However, it also contextualizes these risks, noting the relatively low incidence of leptospirosis in NYC. A core argument is the human tendency to assign blame to animals, often overlooking human behaviors as the root cause of problems. This is illustrated by comparing rats to other animals deemed "pests," such as rabbits and pigeons, whose reputations have shifted dramatically based on human utility and changing societal needs.\n\nFinally, the episode highlights the profound cultural differences in how rats are perceived globally, contrasting Western disgust with the sacred status of rats in places like the Karni Mata temple in India, where they are revered as reincarnated ancestors. This cultural divergence underscores the subjective nature of what constitutes a "pest" and reveals more about human attitudes, values, and our relationship with the natural world than about the animals themselves. The episode concludes by emphasizing that while rats do present challenges, the intensity of human hatred often reflects our own anxieties and our propensity to externalize blame rather than address underlying systemic issues like waste management and urban planning.

The ideal candidate, the listing read, is highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty, determined to look at all solutions from various angles including data collection, technology innovation and wholesale slaughter.

Rats do something to traumatize you and I hate rats.

My take is the more people are talking about this topic, the better it is for the work we're doing.

We hate their success because their success feels like our failure.

Blaming the rat is pretty much, you know, game over in terms of the rat's global reputation.

It became very clear that rats could not have played a major role in the spread of plague in Europe.

The animals are just being animals. They're about us. They're about where we think animals belong and what we think those animals should be doing.

We are the major vectors of disease to each other. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that.

I think of the pigeon as kind of the outdated cell phone of the animal world. Right? We used to have such a use for them and now we don't and we can't fathom why they won't go away.

Other cultures do not associate rats with disgust.