622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats? | Freakonomics Radio

New York City’s mayor calls them “public enemy number one.” History books say they caused the Black Death — although recent scientific evidence disputes that claim. So is the rat a scapegoat? And what does our rat hatred say about us? (Part one of a three-part series.) You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-does-everyone-hate-rats/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. Steven Dubner. This year will mark a pair of anniversaries for us. And even though I ignore most anniversaries, these two have got their hooks in me. It has been 20 years since Steve Levitt and I published Freakonomics, and it's been 15 years since I started Freakonomics Radio. So we are thinking about making some kind of anniversary episode, and I want to know if you have anything to share. Maybe it's a story about how you were influenced or inspired by something from Freakonomics. Maybe it's some kind of memory or coincidence that you'd like to tell us about. Whatever it is, send us an email or a voice memo, whichever you prefer. Our address is [email protected].

• 0:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks in advance for that, and as always, thanks for listening.

• 0:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  In the fall of 2022, a new job listing was posted on a New York City government website. "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." And what kind of government job requires wholesale slaughter? Here is the man responsible for this listing.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Rats do something to traumatize you, and I hate rats.

• 1:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  If you walk down the block and a rat runs across your foot, you never forget it. Every time you walk down that block, you relive that.

• 1:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  As you may have heard, Adams was indicted last year on five federal criminal charges, including bribery and wire fraud. Although in a remarkable departure from legal precedent, the Trump administration Justice Department just ordered those charges dismissed. Through it all, the mayor's anti-rat fervor has been undiminished.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Fighting crime, fighting inequality, fighting rats. Public enemy number one, many of you don't know, are rats. If you're not scared of rats, you are really my hero.

• 2:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that job that was posted on NYC.gov, that was Eric Adams searching for his hero, who turned out to be this person.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  I was certainly taken aback. I mean, the job posting itself got a lot of fanfare.

• 2:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I just want to read it to verbatim. The job posting called for someone with a, quote, "swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and a general aura of badassery."

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that you?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  I guess. Those are not words I'd necessarily include in my 150 characters.

• 2:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  But come on, it sounds like you fit pretty well.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that swashbuckling badass is?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Kathy Karate. I'm the Citywide Director of Rugged Mitigation for the City of New York, also known as The Rat Czar.

• 3:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how do you like that title, The Rat Czar?

• 3:12Speaker 02

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

• 3:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  New York and many other cities have seen a rise in their rat populations, especially during COVID. And now they are fighting back. But is wholesale slaughter really the way to go? That is one of the many rat questions that I am eager to answer over the next few episodes. The brown rat, also known as Ratus norvegicus, is one of the most reviled animals in the world.

• 3:45Speaker 03

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

• 3:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  We will hear the details of New York's rat mitigation plan.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  There's a whole 99-page report about how we're going to do that.

• 4:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  But we will also hear from rat lovers. Eventually, because you're feeding it, because it's a little bit lovely, you end up feeling some warmth towards it. And what you might call rat exonerators.

• 4:15Speaker 04

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

• 4:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And let's not forget the rat as cultural icon. This is a story about a rat who wants to become a chef. Everyone laughs. Everyone gets it. You're sold. Are you sold?

• 4:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm going to take that as a yes. Our three-part series on rats begins now.

• 4:54Speaker 05

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Rat mitigation is complicated. It's looking at the forest and the trees at the same time.

• 5:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is New York City's rat czar, Kathy Karate.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Really, when it comes down to rats, what we're talking about is an animal that lives in such close proximity to humans, and that's why we have such a focus on them.

• 5:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  I understand that your relationship with rats goes back pretty far to when you were a kid growing up in New York. I understand that you circulated a petition in your neighborhood to get rid of some rats. Is that true?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  It is true. I grew up in a house that was abutting railroad tracks. And what you need to know about rats, and you'll get a quick and dirty here, is they need a place to live and they need food to eat. So any space that's not getting ongoing maintenance and can have overgrown brush or weeds, things of that nature, provides ideal habitat for them to burrow and create their nest. And that's what we had behind my house. With the encouragement of my mom and our neighbor, we circulated a petition to get the local train company to take care of that harborage condition and address the rats.

• 6:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did it work?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  It did, yeah. You know, they cleaned the area. But the hard thing about rats is one time doesn't solve. That's why it makes it such a challenging issue.

• 6:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Karate wound up getting an undergraduate degree in biology and a master's in urban sustainability. She taught elementary school for a while and then she took a job in New York City's Department of Education in their sustainability office.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  How I got tuned into rat mitigation work was through that role. We ran zero waste programming and because garbage and rats go hand in hand, my team was tasked with rat mitigation on the waste side for public schools. So I was out and about 120 different school buildings, talking with facility staff, how do we manage our waste better, talking with staff, students and principal about waste sorting behaviors and how we can make cleaner waste streams, less access to food sources for rats. The key to pest management, any pest management, first and foremost is sanitation.

• 7:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Most people, when they think about sanitation, generally do not think of New York City. There are many things to love about this place, many things worth admiring, but let's be honest, it is not a particularly clean city. Trash on the sidewalks is a thing, especially food wrappers and big bags of restaurant trash. For a population of rats, all that food waste represents something like paradise. And how big is New York's rat population?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  There's no census. So if anyone is telling you a number, don't believe it.

• 7:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  I have seen an estimate by M and M Pest Control that puts the city's rat population at around 3 million. Do you think that's ballpark or no chance?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  We're not going to discuss a number. It's kind of futile. And then anything you put out there then gets used as this watermark of it was 3 million in 2024, someone else said it was 8 million in 2006. It's an unfair assessment.

• 8:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, let me go back to your official title, Director of Rodent Mitigation. Does that include squirrels, chipmunks, et cetera?

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Squirrels, chipmunks, mice, all other rodents in the city. The main focus is on rats. There's more of a community aspect when it comes to rats. Their commensal, meaning they sit at the table with us.

• 8:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is that word you used, commensal?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Yes, commensal.

• 8:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  What does that mean?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  It literally means like a seat at the table, meaning that they are thriving and existing because of the plate we've set for them in our urban spaces. Certainly, the house mouse, in a lot of regards, is more successful, we can say, than a rat in terms of how it breeds and how it occupies urban spaces and non-urban spaces. But rats are known for their ability to exploit and thrive where humans are densest.

• 9:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you think about rats versus the other rodents that are sometimes a problem? Rats look like bigger mice, sort of, and then there are squirrels, which most people seem to think are really cute, and people feed squirrels outside. I've never seen anybody feeding a rat outside, but is a rat just a squirrel with less attractive body hair?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  In a way, and I would say people are unintentionally feeding rats all the time across our city. Maybe they're not throwing acorns or peanuts, but almost all of human behaviors in urban spaces end up feeding rats.

• 9:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  How smart are rats?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  They are smart. I have not seen anything like a comparative IQ test for them.

• 9:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, chipmunks always look pretty dumb to me. They're super cute, but they look dumb. Maybe I'm wrong.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  I would say, you know, in terms of how we gauge savviness, the rat is right up there. There's more and more research coming out about them and empathy and laughing and altruism.

• 10:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Seriously?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. And what we know is, in terms of adaptability to survive, there's few species greater. They will avoid new things in their environment because they're unsure if they're harmful or helpful. There are stories of less dominant rats being sent out to test a new food source and then being monitored to see if there's ill effects. So they are survivors, and I would say no one except humans exploits an urban space better.

• 10:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Rats have been exploiting New York City's urban space for at least a few hundred years. The ancestors of today's rats are thought to have arrived in the 18th century on ships from Europe. But in the historical rat timeline, that is still relatively recent. Genetically, they date back to the time of dinosaurs. Today, there are two main species: the black rat, Ratus ratus, which likely originated in India, and then the brown rat that we are familiar with, Ratus nervicus, the Norway rat, even though it did not originate in Norway. So why is it called that?

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Because everybody who hates rats wants to name them after somebody they don't like.

• 11:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Bethany Brookshire.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  So basically, the name stuck because somebody was picking a fight with Norway at the time?

• 11:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brookshire is a science journalist with a PhD in physiology and pharmacology. She recently published a book called Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. So you can see where her allegiance lies. Here is some more rat history.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Europe was very black rat dominated, until, we think, the 17th or 18th centuries, when we began to see the brown rat. That is native to what we think of as Mongolia. Ratus nervicus ended up getting spread into Europe, and then with colonialism, it just went everywhere else, because rats and boats go together real good. Interestingly, people have not liked rats, but they didn't necessarily consider them disgusting until about the 18th or 19th century. People didn't like them because they were a problem of the food supply, right? They would get in and they would eat your food. And nobody wants that.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  But they weren't considered to be disgusting in terms of they weren't considered to carry disease for a very long time. The association of rats with disease is a relatively recent one.

• 12:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  How did that association come to be made? And how much does it intersect with the plague in Europe?

• 12:44Speaker 03

  It intersects with the plague, but not when you think it does. So there have been three major pandemics of plague that we know of in recorded history. The first was the plague of Justinian, which I believe was in the 6th century. The second was the Black Death, which was famous and began in the 14th century. The third global pandemic of bubonic plague is now. It began in the 19th century, but it persists even now. Actually, people every year in the United States, in Mongolia, and in Madagascar in particular, get plague.

• 13:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  To be clear, the plague persists today in very small numbers, just a few hundred reported cases a year, fewer than a dozen in the US. But this third wave of bubonic plague has done terrible damage over the past 100 years, in India especially during the early 20th century, and in Vietnam during its war in the 1960s and 70s. The plague is caused by a bacterium known as

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Yersinia pestis.

• 13:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  You see, it's right there in the name, Yersinia pestis. The Yersinia part comes from Alexandre Yersin, the first scientist to describe and culture these bacteria.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  The bubonic plague is technically not a disease of humans. It is a disease of rats and fleas that happens to spill over into humans from time to time with catastrophic effects.

• 14:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how much do we know about how the plague is spread?

• 14:15Speaker 03

  What we do know is that fleas get Yersinia pestis, and then the bacteria forms a biofilm inside the esophagus of the rat flea, and the biofilm coats the esophagus so that the rat flea can't swallow. It's just biting and biting and biting and biting, but it can't swallow anything and it starves to death. And you start to feel really bad for the flea until you realize that everything it bites, it's barfing up little bits of bacteria into the bite, spreading plague. So that's how plague is traditionally transmitted.

• 14:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. And then how is plague spread between humans? For that, we will bring in another scientist.

• 15:00Speaker 06

  In humans, it can be spread partly by ectoparasites.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  Or by droplets. So coughing when you're having a cold, then that's a way of transmission.

• 15:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Niels Christian Stenseth, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Oslo.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  And for the last 25 years or so, I've been studying plague, Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that caused the Black Death.

• 15:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Black Death tore through Europe in the mid 14th century. It is hard to believe just how brutal it was.

• 15:35Speaker 06

  The Black Death killed half of the European population in a year or two. The plague expresses itself in the human being in three different forms. The most common one is bewonik, where it's swellings on the body, that may evolve into a pneumonic wound that goes into the lung, and both might develop into a form that goes into the blood. If you're infected by Yersinia pestis, if you don't come to a doctor within four or five days, you can consider yourself being dead.

• 16:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  During the Middle Ages, it was neither rats nor fleas who were thought to be responsible for the Black Death. Most of the blame was put on witches and Jews, but time and science eventually caught up with the rats. And if anything is going to give an animal species a bad reputation, it's killing off half of Europe. The association between rats and plague remains strong today. In the opening credits of The Decameron, a new Netflix show set during the Black Death, a massive swarm of rats come together to spell out the title. And the recent remake of the film Nosferatu shows a pack of rats following the vampire,

• 16:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  carrying the plague with them. But were rats really responsible for the Black Death?

• 17:00Speaker 06

  That's the one that most people think are the right one. They are wrong.

• 17:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.

• 17:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  One reason that rats are so despised is because they spread disease, the most famous instance being the Black Death, a pandemic of bubonic plague in the 14th century that killed millions upon millions of Europeans. But scientists have recently challenged the claim that rats caused the Black Death. Scientists, including Niels Christiansen Stenseth at the University of Oslo. Challenging a claim like this is not a simple thing.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  I usually say to my students that if you want to have enemies within science, study plague, because there are so many strong personalities and there are so many different opinions and they hate each other.

• 18:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  The standard epidemiological model of the Black Death is that humans were exposed to the plague by rats who had been bitten by diseased fleas. But in 2018, Stenseth and his colleagues published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where they presented a different model. "Despite the historical significance of the disease," they wrote, "the mechanisms underlying the spread of plague in Europe are poorly understood. While it is commonly assumed that rats and their fleas spread plague, there is little historical and archaeological support for such a claim. We show that human ectoparasites, like body lice and human fleas, might be more likely than rats

• 18:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  to have caused the rapidly developing epidemics." And what is Stenseth's evidence that rats were not responsible for the Black Death? He and his co-authors looked at plague death rates from the 1300s to the 1700s, drawn from census records and historical accounts from cities, including London, Barcelona, Florence. "Based on the velocity at which the plague spread in these places," Stenseth concluded, "the human parasite model was much more likely than the rat parasite model."

• 19:21Speaker 06

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

• 19:31Speaker 04

  One of the reasons why the rat-led plagues need to be slow is the rat has to die before the flea leaves the rat. So the flea stays on the rat as long as the rat's alive. It's only when the rat dies that the flea then hops to a human host.

• 19:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that is Ed Glazer.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  I'm the Fred Nellie L. Glimp, professor of economics at Harvard University.

• 19:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's right. Glazer is an economist, not an epidemiologist, or a biologist, or even a rat expert. But Glazer is an expert in cities, which is where rats thrive and where disease spreads. And when we told him we were working on this rat series, he did some extra credit reading.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  I have now read enough in various academic journals that it seems like we have a consensus this was not by and large rat carried. They do seem to have played a critical role in the third bubonic plague explosion, although probably not in the first two.

• 20:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  So having determined that, that there is at least some guilt of the rat in at least the third pandemic, but perhaps not the most famous, the Black Death, how would you say that the modern day reputation of the rat has been affected by or informed by its implication in past disease carrying?

• 20:42Speaker 04

  So blaming the rat is pretty much, you know, game over in terms of the rat's global reputation. I think we should also just object to using the word guilt on rats. It's not like they know what's going on. They're dying too. I mean, let's push the guilt where it belongs. Let's go to Yersinia pestis itself. That's where the evil lies.

• 21:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Glazer is the author of a book called Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. And the fact is that cities and rats seem to be an inevitable pairing. In the ruins of Pompeii, there were rats. To estimate the size of human populations in ancient cities, modern scientists use archaeological evidence of rat populations.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  When cities are at their best, they do enable people who are outsiders to thrive. It's hard to imagine more of an outsider than a rat.

• 21:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  To an economist, do rats present an obvious economic angle, or maybe even multiple ones?

• 21:40Speaker 04

  Well, sure. Rats are, you know, they're agents of usually negative externalities within cities, right? So they're part of what enables diseases to spread across people, and consequently, they're somewhat risky. I don't know what positive things we get out of rats, but there probably are some, in the same sense that, you know, the four pest program that Mao followed, he thought getting rid of the sparrows was great. It turns out the sparrows kept the locusts under control, and without the sparrows, the locusts went haywire and destroyed the crops, leading to a massive famine.

• 22:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, there was reportedly a big surge in rat population in New York City starting around 2020. I'm curious to know your thoughts on why. Obviously, COVID is a factor to consider. There were, in the aftermath of COVID, the eruption of hundreds, maybe thousands, of outdoor dining sheds outside of restaurants, so I'm curious what you think of all that.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Certainly, COVID seems to have played some kind of a role. I mean, there were a whole bunch of city services that diminished because people were working from home, or just weren't going, and so forth. So I wouldn't rule that out completely. Certainly, changes in the food availability seem likely to be quite important. This would feel a lot better with some kind of measurement.

• 22:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, if I recall correctly, you were born and raised in Manhattan.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Indeed.

• 22:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  One could imagine that rats destroy or degrade the reputation of a city like New York. Do you put much stock in that argument?

• 23:00Speaker 04

  Oh, that seems a little bit far-fetched, to think that it's such an important deal. I would say that what rats effectively do is they reduce the density level for people. And so they tend not to be density multipliers about the good things about cities, which are, you know, enabling us to learn from one another. I've never heard of a rat carrying a message that was effectively interpreted, but they do seem to carry the negative stuff that we get from being close to one another.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  There's an economic impact as well. So thinking about damages to property.

• 23:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  They like to chew wires, don't they?

• 23:33Speaker 02

  They like to chew everything.

• 23:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is New York City rat czar Kathy Karate.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  That is literally their nature to chew. They chew through holes in foundations. They can damage different food sources. You know, when we're thinking about storage of food and grains and things of that nature, there's, you know, a human cost in terms of public health and then mental well being, the mental effects on folks living in and around rats. That's well documented and being studied even more. You know, stress, anxiety, depression, documented, peer reviewed papers saying this is real. There's also a public health risk. Leptospirosis is one of the more famous illnesses associated with rats, and that's due to a bacteria that they can transmit through their urine. So there's real public health concerns.

• 24:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Although, from what I've seen, the last numbers, 2023, it looked like in New York City, 24 people were diagnosed with leptospirosis, the highest number of reported cases in a single year, but this city of over 8 million. So that sounds like a pretty minor threat, no?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  I'm with you. It's certainly not the highest public health risk we have across, you know, our city or the globe.

• 24:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  But that's also people. I understand dogs get leptospirosis as well, and that maybe is a bigger problem for New Yorkers?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Yes, dogs have a vaccine for leptospirosis. There's other, I'd say, unrealized potential public health risks when it comes to rats. So a paper out of Columbia University studied rats across New York City and looked at the different lice, ticks, fleas they carried, and also looked at different viruses, pathogens that were existing on their bodies, and found a bunch of novel viruses that were living on them. There's always this threat when we're talking about viruses, about their potential to mutate and jump hosts. Because rats are so close to us in where and how they live, that threat just gets higher and higher.

• 25:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, is the threat of disease really what this is about?

• 25:32Speaker 03

  The fact that we're so quick to blame the rat says a lot about us.

• 25:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio, and we will be right back. I'm sorry, we will be right back.

• 25:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  A rat is a rodent, a member of the order Rodentia, which contains over 2,000 species. Nearly half of all mammals are rodents. They are famous for their gnawing ability, which is carried out by large pairs of upper and lower front incisors. Squirrels, mice, beavers, hamsters, prairie dogs, porcupines, they are all rodents. But it seems fair to say that rats are the most despised member of this order. Why? For that, let's go back to Bethany Brookshire.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  I'm the author of the 2022 book, "Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains."

• 26:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Talk about just the title itself and what kind of work you're asking that word pests to do.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Pests, the word, does so much work in our society, just in general. It has become a word for animals that are not where we want them to be. And that was one of the things that I became really fixated on, is the fact that the animals that we hate are so subjective. 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.

• 27:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think the rat has been unfairly tarnished, its reputation over time, by having been associated with the Black Death?

• 27:24Speaker 03

  I don't know that it's been unfairly tarnished. I certainly think there was probably a place for it. I do think the fact that we're so quick to blame the rat says a lot about us. Because the reality is, the thing that causes most diseases in humans, like communicable diseases, is other humans.

• 27:46Speaker 03

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

• 27:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Humans do like to assign blame to other animals, but as Brookshire points out, the blame can be assigned somewhat randomly. Consider the rabbit. The rabbit is not a rodent, although it used to be classified as such. Today, it is considered a lagomorph since it has four upper incisors, not two. For most people, the rabbit is thought of as, I believe the technical term is cute. It's fluffy. It hops. It has facial features that kind of look like a human baby. If we think of rats as trash eaters, we think of rabbits as carrot nibblers. So cute. But not everywhere is the rabbit considered so benign. In Australia,

• 28:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  where rabbits nibble some $125 million worth a year of agricultural crops, there is a new rabbit czar tasked with curbing the Australian bunny population. In her book, Bethany Brookshire writes about many other animals who are considered pests in some circumstances, even if they don't deserve to be, like snakes and elephants and coyotes, and the well-known bird that some people today call rats with wings.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  The pigeon became domesticated around 8,000 years ago, we think, which makes it one of the earliest domesticated birds. Pigeons were cornerstones of many societies. They were incredibly important, not just for food, though we absolutely ate them. If you've never had squab, I highly recommend. It's delicious. We used them as messengers, and in fact, we decorated pigeons that served in war. Pigeons were used to carry messages, and one of my favorite things is that pigeons were the foundation of modern journalism.

• 29:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sorry?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  How so?

• 29:47Speaker 03

  When the wire service Reuters started, it was not on a wire, it was on the wing. It was on the pigeon because Reuters figured out he could fly hot stock tips to and from Aachen and beat the train by two hours. And of course, we also use them for their poop because pigeon poop is excellent fertilizer. And there's wonderful dove coats. You can still see some of them today, developed by the ancient Persians that are these beautiful bell shapes so that all the poop falls to the bottom and you can scoop it.

• 30:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so that history of pigeons is really interesting, but now pigeons, they're what? Just another pest essentially?

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a wonderful piece of work by Colin Gerald Mack, who actually documented the fall of the pigeon in the public eye via articles in the New York Times over a century. And he was able to document that over about 100 years pigeons went from noble, innocent, beautiful, to rats with wings. You know, we no longer needed fertilizer, we have chemical fertilizer. We don't need messengers anymore, we have email. And we don't need squab anymore, we have chicken.

• 30:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  How would you say that the history of the human pigeon relationship compares with the history of the rat-human relationship?

• 31:07Speaker 03

  I would say the history of the human pigeon relationship differs in that we once had a use for the pigeon. I think of the pigeon as kind of the outdated cellphone 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. It's so sad.

• 31:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, and if I were to ask you to summarize the downsides and the upsides of rats generally, how would you characterize that?

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Well, there are plenty of downsides associated with rats. People don't like them. They find them both physically and psychologically really stressful. People who live very closely with rats, it's awful. No one should have to live that way. Rats give people feelings of unsettledness. Right? They are very associated with our feelings of disgust. And I'm saying that in terms of Western cultures, in terms of like the global north. Other cultures do not associate rats with disgust.

• 32:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give me an example of where rats are not thought of as disgusting.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  So the Temple of Karnimata, it's located in Deshnoge, India. This temple houses around 25,000 black rats. And those rats are considered sacred. They are holy. I got to speak to some of the people who help run the temple, who cook the food for the rats. It's a beautiful temple. It has solid silver doors carved with rats. There are beautiful marble floors for the rats. The rats drink from beautiful decorated bowls of milk, huge bowls of milk. They eat a wonderfully healthy diet. They get whole wheat bread, like whole bran. They get fruit, vegetables.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  And people come to make fire and food offerings to these rats. It's because the rats are not considered to be real rats. The rats are reincarnations of people. So the legend is that this woman, Karnimata, grew up in that area and she grew up to be a sage. She had mystical powers. And so when her sister's son passed away, he drowned while playing. Her sister brought her, the boy, and begged her to bring him back. And Karnimata interceded with Yama, the god of death.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  And Yama said, okay, the people from your family will no longer die. They will be reincarnated as rats. And then those rats, when they die, will again be reincarnated as people. And so now that temple, the family does still worship there. And it has been several hundred years. But other people, devotees, worship there as well because they believe that they will also be blessed if they are devoted enough to be reincarnated as these rats.

• 34:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  What would you say are the drivers of the difference between one place or one culture and another, one in which the rat is looked at as just disgusting, a menace, dangerous, scary, et cetera, and one where it's not? What constitutes that difference, do you think?

• 34:19Speaker 03

  I would say there are a couple of things. There is one angle that's very cultural, right? I ended up interviewing for my book a bunch of people who worked in biblical scholarship. We ended up talking about translations and our understandings of things like Genesis. And God gave people dominion over the animals.

• 34:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a big line, yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  And that has become very deeply ingrained in many of our cultural ideas of what we should be able to control and how we should be able to control it. I would say that's one of the reasons that we hate these animals is because we expect animals around us to fail. We are prepared for that. We move into an area, we pave it over, we put up a Walmart, a Target, a Starbucks, a McDonald's, what have you, and we expect the animals to leave. And then we wring our hands. We are so upset. We have killed off this beautiful species. The species becomes beautiful. It becomes charismatic.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  It becomes this wonderful thing. And look at the horrible stuff we've done to it. But when an animal is still there, we're kind of mad. We don't like it. It's now where we've decided it doesn't belong, even if it always lived there. Now it's our space. You don't belong there anymore. And we get really upset, especially if the animals begin to thrive. And especially if they thrive off things we value. Right? Our gardens, our crops, our cats. We really hate them. We hate their success because their success feels like our failure.

• 36:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  To the animals that we call pests, what are humans? Are we just, you know, pests that text and build parking lots?

• 36:21Speaker 03

  That's actually something I got a lot when I was writing the book is it's humans. Humans are the real pests. We're the ones invading the world and taking it over and making it awful. I think that's too easy because it's the sort of thing that makes you fling up your hands and be like, oh, there's nothing I can do. We have choices in the way that we treat other animals and we have choices in the way we treat each other. And we don't need to live the way that we always have.

• 36:52Speaker 04

  So I think it is certainly true that the innate human reaction to rats, I don't know why, is largely revulsion.

• 36:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is The Economist Ed Glazer.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  Certainly when you see them in an urban context surrounded by trash, right? So you associate the rats with the filth, with drinking the water in the subway, right? It's hard not to think of that as being sort of awful.

• 37:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Since rats are no longer a big disease vector, at least for now in most places, do you think our frightened view of them is simply outdated? And that for the most part, rats are, yes, a negative externality of humans in cities, but a really minor one that we shouldn't worry so much about?

• 37:30Speaker 04

  I think it's probably pretty small. That being said, I would still probably be in favor of policies that keep the rat population manageable in the sense that who knows what happens if you let it get incredibly vast? Who knows what new diseases occur or what spreads across things? So I think some control, but not making a fetish out of complete eradication.

• 37:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Ed, let's play a quick game of word association. When I say rats, you say what?

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Cuddly.

• 37:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Come on now, you're just trying to make me happy now, aren't you?

• 37:59Speaker 04

  You know, it's hard not to think that rats have gotten something of a bad rap. They certainly are not healthy to have in vast numbers around you. But, you know, it's a very urban species and I tend to like that. They sort of co-live with humans. They're, in some sense, our natural city partner.

• 38:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  I want to run past you at a couple of titles we're considering for this series. Let me know what you think. One is the exoneration of the rat. Too much?

• 38:24Speaker 04

  It feels a little strong. It feels a little strong because it's not like this thing does not do anything. But something in that neighborhood sounds good.

• 38:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Could I interest you in sympathy for the rat?

• 38:34Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes, I love it. I love it. And the echo, of course, with the Rolling Stones is great.

• 38:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Although the Rolling Stones sympathy, this is sympathy for the devil. The devil is the narrator of that song. You know, I shouted out, "Who killed the Kennedys?" When after all, it was you and me. So it's not the purest sympathy, let's say. Do you still like this angle?

• 38:59Speaker 04

  I do. I do. I think in general, having sympathy for a creature that, you know, coexisted with us, that suffers many of the same negative sides from cities as we do, that enjoys many of the same positive sides of cities that we do, the ability to create this ecosystem. I think that's a very worthy aim. And even if we do have to control the rat, not viewing it as so much horror, but rather viewing it as being, you know, our urban partner, seems like it makes more sense.

• 39:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next time in part two of Sympathy for the Rat, we will talk about how to control this urban partner of ours.

• 39:39Speaker 07

  I believe that the single biggest swing that you can take at the rat problem in New York City is getting the trash bags off of the streets.

• 39:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we'll explore the city with a master of the urban rat.

• 39:54Speaker 08

  Rodents are really great examples of work hard and you'll be successful.

• 39:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we'll visit a place that claims to be nearly rat-free.

• 40:03Speaker 09

  People are desperate and they want to know what our secret is.

• 40:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski, with help from Dalvin Abouaji. Special thanks to Freakonomics Radio listener Jason Weeks for suggesting this topic. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Sarah Lilly,

• 40:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. Our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Whenever I do calls at home, my dog thinks it's an opportunity to voice his opinion as well.

• 41:11Speaker 05

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Stitcher.