S1E3: Storied Rats

 In episode three, Claudia Hirtenfelder reads an excerpt about rats from Dawn Day Biehler’s “Pests in the City.”  The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast. Season 1 is focused on “Animals and The Urban.” 

 Featured: 

• Pests in the City by Dawn Day Biehler 
• The Animal Turn "Animal Highlights (Animals and The Urban)" Playlist on Youtube. 

Team Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, producer and host 
• Christiaan Mentz, sound editor and producer 
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Learn more about the team here. 

Sound Credits:

• Book page turning, Freesound.org
• Rat smelling, Freesound.org
• Dog barking, Freesound.org
• Scurrying, Happy PonyTail
• Gnawing wood, Animal Net
• Sound of walking up creaking steps, Freesound.org
• Bucket tipping over and light switching on, recorded by Christiaan Mentz 

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• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Sponsor:

• Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics sponsored the season of The Animal Turn Podcast where these highlights were originally aired. Originally Aired/Recorded: 29 March 2021.

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:57 An excerpt about rats
• 4:20 Facts about rats
• 6:12 Credits

Transcript

00:00 - Introduction 

• This first season animals and the urban and is extracted from Season 3 of The Animal Turn Podcast.  
• In today’s highlight we are focusing on rats

00:57 – An excerpt about rats

• Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats by Dawn Day Biehler 
• Has a chapter dedicated to rats which includes an excerpt about rats in the great depression: 

“A Norway rat emerged from his burrow as dusk fell over Baltimore’s east side on an early spring evening in 1937. The air carried a faint scent of food, as well as scents of people, dogs, and cats. The high-board wooden fence surrounding the backyard provided reliable shelter from these minor threats despite its ramshackle condition—perhaps because of it. The rat’s gray-brown fur brushed against the fence as he trotted along it, retracing the greasy line left a few inches above the ground by generations of his kin. 

He poked his nose under the fence, testing the space with his sensitive whiskers. His whiskers barely grazed the boards, signaling to him that he had more than enough room to pass through. On the other side, the rat found the neighbors’ back stairs, atop which sat a bucket of kitchen scraps, its contents lean in these hard times, waiting to be dumped in a busted wooden barrel by the alley. The rat had seen this bucket there before. If he had not, he would have approached much more tentatively. His wariness served him well; new objects in the environment could be traps or poisons. 

One of the larger rats on the block, he easily reached the first step with his front paws and bounded up crooked wooden stairs until he reached the bucket and tipped it over. Another large male rat joined him, and the two licked juice from crab shells and nibbled at tiny scraps of meat left inside. Suddenly the light came on in the kitchen and a small dog barked from inside the back screen door. Startled, the rats reared up and squealed. The dog retreated, and the rats fled. They jumped down to the ground, scurried across the yard, and squeezed under the fence and into the alley.

Many of the block’s two-hundred-some rats departed their burrows after sunset to eat, drink, and mate. Across the alley, a pregnant female lapped at a tub where rain had collected during a morning shower. She had given birth to five litters of six to nine young in the past year, but many of her pups died young from disease, starvation, or predation. A young rat peeked out from under the rotted and gnawed bottom of a privy-shed door and ducked back inside upon seeing a cat peering down from the back porch. Large adult rats had little to fear from dogs or cats, however.3 Another young rat gnawed with her strong jaws and ever-growing teeth at the edges of a hole in the wooden platform of the back porch, enlarging the hole enough to squeeze inside.

 Several rats made their homes in the house’s cavity walls, rotting floors, and crumbling cellar. They enjoyed better access to stored food than their outdoor cousins, for the pantry consisted of open shelving without cabinet doors. They also transmitted fleas, mites, parasites, and bacteria to one another more easily than their backyard cousins. Indoor rats faced more frequent confrontations with human residents, which often proved fatal for rats, and sometimes injurious, infectious, or deadly to people.”

04:20 – Facts about rats

• Rats are primarily nocturnal. 
• Their teeth never stop growing.
• They use their whiskers to get a sense of place by brushing against a wall. 
• Rats eyes can move in opposite directions. 
• They have an exceptional sense of smell, over 1000 olfactory receptors (humans have about 400 and dogs about 800)
• Rats have been used to clear landmines. 
• They are extremely social, they live in small groups and are known to mourn. They are prone to depression and peer pressure. 
• Rats spend a greet deal of time cleaning each other.  

06:12 – Credits 

• “A huge thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring The Animal Turn Podcast, where these clips were taken from. To Christiaan Mentz for editing this episode. Thank you also goes to Rebecca Shen for designing the Animal Highlight logo and episode art work.”