I know, I know. The Year of
the Rat is associated with wealth and material prosperity; it’s supposed to be
good for getting focused and organized, and for investments (although this Year
of the Rat soothsayers are saying that we likely just won’t go into recession).
And people born in the Year
of the Rat are charismatic, intelligent, practical, hard-working and
aggressive. Leaders of a sort, if they play their cards right.
And I know that the rat in
the Chinese zodiac carries all sorts of other positive attributes —
forthrightness, discipline, meticulousness —and that we’re supposed to get out
of our collective Westernized head space when we think about these things.
But I’m sorry. Every time I
hear that it’s the Year of the Rat, coming soon to a lunar calendar near you,
all I can picture is the hideous, fat black roof rat with its obscene, fleshy
tail that used to run along the beam under our deck, its glinty little eyes
scanning, scanning, scanning for sunflower seeds the birds spilled from the
feeder.
Unlike my girlfriend, who
suffered who knows how many mice scurrying across her wee nine-year-old self
when she had to sleep on the floor of a house in Regina her family rented one
night before the moving van arrived, I’ve never been too freaked out by rats.
But this one was a doozy.
There was something about him — maybe the way he defied all manner of traps and
bait — that spooked and impressed me at the same time. I mean, this was one
smart rat who didn’t fall for stinky cheese or peanut butter, bait traps or
humane traps. I think it was smoked salmon skin that was his final undoing, so
you had to hand it to him; he was a pretty cool rat with selective good taste.
Remy take note.
Up until then, I’d never
given much thought to what rats eat exactly, nor to eating them myself. At
least not until I ventured up into the northern nether-reaches of Thailand,
which was serenely beautiful but realistically couldn’t have been all that
serene given it was a refuge/staging area for Karen rebels who had fled
Myanmar.
There, in the middle of the
mountain trail leading up to a village on a large scruff of bare dirt, were two
cheerful girls, maybe eight and ten, who were carefully washing and, with a
large dull machete, diligently scraping the short fur from a very dead rat
stiffened with rigor mortis.
I watched them for quite a
while, scraping, scraping then rinsing that rat with their small hands in a
bright turquoise plastic basin half filled with cool, clear water. They drew
very little blood, given they were well practised, having already scraped clean
three or four plump, glistening bluish-grey rat bodies that were piled in a
heap. There were two more to go.
I suppose it wouldn’t be too
bad eating rat meat, depending, of course, on what the rats themselves had
eaten. Those jungle rats looked pretty healthy and given all the lush, fragrant
flora around, they likely tasted quite delicious. Those two young girls certainly
looked healthy.
Some people call the urban
pigeons that accumulate in stinky, parasite-laden masses in city parks and
plazas feathered rats, given their similarity in haunts and traits to the
mammalian variety. I read once that before Ernest Hemingway earned his wealth
and fame he survived in Paris by killing and eating pigeons. He said they
weren’t too bad.
One small triangular shaped
park not that far from Père-Lachaise Cemetery — which houses the bones of Jim
Morrison, Edith Piaf and other assorted icons — offered particularly good
hunting for nice, plump feathered rats (I only know it is triangular-shaped
because I sat on a bench there and read the account about Hemingway).
In New Orleans and
surrounding environs, they encourage locals to trap and eat nutrias, also known
as nutra-rats; not to be confused with the prehistoric supra rat-like rodent,
the
remains of which were recently
found in Uruguay. It likely weighed a tonne when it roamed the Earth.
The nutria is a cross
between a rodent and a beaver (think webbed feet, ratty face and long, pink
scaly tail) that looks like a big fat wet rat if you ever see one in a southern
swamp. This South American native was brought to North America for its fur and
is now considered a real nuisance for all the water plants it munches on.
As for what rats eat before
they are eaten, ask anyone who has had a rat problem and they’ll tell you it’s
pretty well anything. Being the omnivorous creatures that they are with highly
developed senses and a huge capability to climb, leap, gnaw, jump and burrow,
they generally get into just about anything anywhere — grain, seeds, wild
fruit, bugs, dog food, dead animals, edibles in compost heaps, groceries in
your house and garbage, garbage, garbage. It all depends on where they live.
Robert Sullivan knows more
about their eating habits of rats than most. He spent a couple of years
studying the rats in an alley near Broadway and City Hall in New York City. The
result is the can’t-put-it-down
Rats
, a bestseller that’s as much about New York as its most unwanted
inhabitants.
“The diet of the city rat is
garbage, the refuse of man,” writes Sullivan. “But which garbage? Which
particular kind of refuse? And exactly how much trash does a rat eat?”
One rat trapper in Baltimore
doing rat research long before Sullivan’s time made a list from his
observations. Apparently the garbage-food rats most liked (in order of
descending appeal) were scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, cooked corn
kernels, cooked potatoes and cooked oatmeal. Hmmm, big carb hunters.
The food they least liked
were raw beets, peaches, raw celery, cooked cauliflower, grapefruit and raw
cauliflower. Sounds like a kid’s food pick and no-go lists to me.
After spending a whole
summer tracking his alley rats at a discreet distance — Sullivan didn’t want to
interfere with their behaviour — he concluded that the food rats scurrying
around inside black plastic garbage bags loved most, fought over most was
chicken pot pie. Ratatouille ‘s sophisticated Remy would be oh so disappointed.
Glenda Bartosh is an
award-winning freelance writer who will sneak a peak at the Year of the Rat
parade, and the neighbourhood rats, in Vancouver’s Chinatown February 10.