I’ve been rereading a National Geographic article about rats that I clipped some time ago. Entitled “In The City’s Shadow” and written by Emma Marris, it begins with this sentence. “Rats are our shadow selves.”

Mostly the article focuses on why we hate rats and how we try to exterminate them, but rats have redeeming social value.One of those redeeming qualities got my attention right away. Marris quotes a study showing that rats will free other rats from cages—instead of gorging on chocolate. Now that’s some sacrifice for a brother!

Marris also quotes New York City rodentologist Bobby Corrigan, who says that rats clean up after us, surviving and thriving on our garbage. Like maggots now being used to debreed dead flesh around burns and wounds, rats eat garbage we leave in our streets and alleyways.

In Tribeca Park, Corrigan says, rats hunt and kill pigeons, another of our least-favored forms of urban wildlife. “They leap on [the pigeons’] backs like a leopard on the Serengeti.” On the other hand, they provide food for urban hawks and owls, like that peregrin falcon that nests somewhere on a ledge in Chicago.

Rats provide high-protein food that might be important in our predicted food-starved future. Polynesian explorers took Pacific rats along for food when they settled various islands in the Pacific. The CEO of a trust in New Zealand that guards the rats they call kiore says that they’re half the size of New York rats and they’re “all nice and fluffy and tasty looking.” They even maintain a rat sanctuary on the North Island.

So let’s hear it for the rats, while most of us hope for a population collapse—except for those tasty Pacific rats and kangaroo rats that stay out everybody’s way.

Here’s a podcast that aired on radio station KZUM a couple of years ago.

The Animal I Slept With