THE omnipresence of the colour red and artful displays in town are telltale signs — it’s Chinese New Year. The Year of the Rat. The Metal Rat, to be precise. But why a rat? Who wants to be associated with a rat?
While greeting cards and decorative items manage to depict an excessively cute version of the rodent, outside of Chinese New Year, generally, a rat is a less than well-liked animal. Even if it never was man’s best friend to begin with, the rat’s reputation went literally down the drain in the mid-1300s.
It was (somewhat wrongly) accused of being the main culprit in the devastating Black Death that killed nearly 200 million people in Europe in just seven years. Thanks to a 2015 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we now know that it took infected gerbils, fleas, climate change, camels, more fleas, and yes, rats to bring about such calamity.
Folktales, like The Pied Piper, have since firmly established the rat as a symbol of malevolence in our collective awareness. The evil rat king tries to kill the fair prince aka Nutcracker in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale of the same name. Even in modern times, children stories feature virtuous mice battling wicked rats.
Basil the Mouse Detective and his nemesis Professor Ratigan, or Despereaux and his opponents Roscuro and Botticelli being only two prominent examples. The English language is, as I’m sure others are too, rife with idioms that associate the long-tailed vermin with wretched and despicable behaviour.
“You dirty rat” is hardly meant as a compliment. To rat on someone is no noble deed. A rat that abandons a sinking ship is synonymous with a selfish, spineless character. The suspicion of betrayal, deception or corruption makes one “smell a rat”.
Rats are generally seen as vicious, unclean and parasitic animals that spread diseases, steal and contaminate our food, cause all sorts of havoc and need to be exterminated. In reality, however, rats are intelligent, highly trainable, expert survivors in inhospitable environments, and just as clean, or dirty, as the dwellings they reside in.
Some historians argue that even if rats were partially to blame for the spread of the bubonic plague in Mediaeval Europe, they have, by association, contributed to the Renaissance and Enlightenment that followed in a somewhat “reset” European civilisation.
Nowadays, rats render immense services to scientific advancement in testing labs, they effectively help clear landmines in Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola and Cambodia, expertly sniff out TNT residue as well as tuberculosis, and work in animal-assisted therapy.
Seen in this light, rats don’t seem so repulsive after all. Even the trend-setting machinery that is Hollywood recognised this when in 2007 Pixar released the Academy Award-winning animated film Ratatouille. In this new portrayal of a rat, Remy is cute, likeable, and resourceful.
Dreaming of becoming a chef, he hides in a restaurant kitchen (oh, the irony) and finds an unprejudiced young man who will be his best friend.
Oriental cultures have always associated rats with positive attributes.
The rodent is often portrayed as the vehicle of choice for Ganesha in Indian tradition. Being able to gnaw their way through any obstacle in their way, even wood or steel, the rat acts as the perfect ride for the Hindu god dashing through the universe.
As the first animal of the Chinese zodiac, the rat, or rather a person born in the Year of the Rat, is supposed to possess positive traits of character such as creativity, intelligence, honesty, generosity, and ambition among others.
Personally, I have the good fortune of having not one but two rats in my immediate family. True to their zodiac sign, both are intelligent, honest, generous and resourceful. Gong Xi Fa Cai — Happy New Year of the Rat!
The writer is a long-term expatriate, a restless traveller, an observer of the human condition and unapologetically insubordinate