E THINK OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT AS THE HUMAN REALM, while the natural world is for animals. In consequence, we credit animals that can thrive in towns and cities—creatures like rats and pigeons— with a special toughness, a bit like the people who grow up in the most dangerous areas of our inner cities. That is not entirely mistaken, but we should remember that many of these animals have been thriving in cities since they were first built—in other words, as long as people. Many of them have lived off food that people discard or waste. They are now as thoroughly adapted to urban environments as human beings are. At times, they are resented as “parasites,” but that is generally unfair. Except possibly for rats, mice, and a few insects, they live in a symbiotic relationship with human beings, and perform a valuable service by disposing of organic material that would otherwise decay.
BADGER, ERMINE, GROUNDHOG, AND SQUIRREL
Come play with me;
Why should you run
Through the shaking tree
As though I’d a gun
To strike you dead?
When all I want to do
Is to scratch your head
And let you go.
—W. B. YEATS, “To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no”
Though usually comparatively small, weasels do not hesitate at all to do battle with rats or snakes. Pliny the Elder stated that the weasel was the only animal that could defeat the basilisk, a serpent able to kill other creatures with a single glance. The diminutive creature overcoming such a monster later became a symbol of Christ triumphing over the Devil. In the modern era, as traditional martial virtues have come to be less valued, the weasel’s reputation has declined. In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind and the Willows (1906), weasels form a vicious yet cowardly mob.
The ermine, a relatively large weasel, was sacred to the Zoroastrians. Because of its white color, it has often been associated with the fierce chastity of a soldier of God; Mary Magdalene was depicted wearing an ermine coat in token of her reformation. A popular European legend stated that an ermine, pursued by hunters, would allow itself to be killed rather than soil its beautiful coat with mud. Ermine fur is synonymous with luxury, and was worn by Louis XIV of France and other monarchs.
A related animal, even more important in folklore, is the badger, which is noted for its powerful front legs and long claws adapted for digging. Its burrow under the earth and nocturnal habits make the badger a creature of mystery. In China and, most especially, Japan, badgers are shape shifters, and many stories are told of spirits haunting old buildings, desolate fields or ponds, that turn out to be badgers. Typical is the story of an ascetic hermit on Mount Atago near Kyoto. A hunter would bring him food every day, and one afternoon the hermit confided to his benefactor that the Bodhisattva Fugen visited him every evening upon a white elephant. At the invitation of the hermit, the hunter stayed to see the Fugen. At first, the hunter was dazzled by the vision, but as he gazed more closely he began to feel suspicious. Finally, he shot an arrow at the vision. The Bodhisattva immediately disappeared, and there was a rustling in the bushes. “If it had really been Fugen,” the hunter told the hermit, “the arrow couldn’t have done any damage, so it must have been some monster.” The next morning the two followed a trail of blood and found an enormous badger with an arrow through its breast.
The badger, actually a member of the weasel family, is often thought of as a small bear, and it is one of many animals that have taken the place of the bear in forecasting the coming of spring. The end of the winter was once indicated by the return of the bears from hibernation. As these large animals became scarce, their role as the heralds of spring was taken over in Germany and much of Britain by the badger. According to tradition, they emerge on the same day as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox festivity of Candlemas, which celebrates the presentation of Jesus, “light of the world,” in the temple. According to a German proverb, “the badger peeps out of his hole on Candlemas Day, and, if he sees the sun shining, he draws back into his hole.”
In the United States, the woodchuck or groundhog has replaced the badger in forecasting spring. On February 2—Candlemas Day, but now known popularly as “Groundhog Day” in the United States—the animal will reportedly lift its head out of its burrow. If it sees a shadow, the groundhog will return, and winter will linger six more weeks, but, if it stays out, spring is at hand. Newscasters gather around the homes of famous groundhogs, most notably Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania, and film the moment of ascent. The result is predetermined, or at least manipulated, by heaters that are placed under the ground.
Nobody really pretends to take the augury seriously, but it does have very exalted roots in history and myth, going back to rural societies, in which agriculturalists watched for subtle signs such as the migration of birds or the emergence of animals from hibernation to decide on the best times for planting and harvesting. The slightly embarrassed laughter that usually accompanies the celebration of Groundhog Day may go back to Protestant mockery of Catholic rituals. With irony, and even a little sneering, Groundhog Day celebrates a rural way of life, which we can now barely remember, yet somehow miss. Holidays are times set aside to reflect on the meaning of our past, and Groundhog Day, while seemingly trivial, turns out to have a history as old and complex as perhaps as any celebration.
Especially beloved in the northern hemisphere, however, is the squirrel. It is primarily the long bushy tail that differentiates squirrels from rats, yet what a difference that makes in the way the two are regarded! Rats are often feared and despised, yet squirrels are such a part of our yards and parks that these places would appear desolate without them. Nevertheless, squirrels have been the subject of many ambivalent legends. For the Ainu of Japan, they represented the discarded sandals of the god Aioina, which would never rot, perhaps because squirrels move in spurts that are like footsteps—they seem to hop more than to walk. Malaysians believed squirrels were produced, like butterflies, from the cocoon of a caterpillar, and they considered the dried penis of a squirrel a powerful aphrodisiac. In Norse mythology, the squirrel Ratatosk was the bringer of rain and snow. It moved up and down the tree of life, Yggdrasil, constantly trying to stir up strife between the eagle at the top and the serpent at the base. In Irish mythology, the goddess Maeve has a bird perched on one shoulder and a squirrel on the other, her messengers for the earth and sky. The habit of hoarding nuts made squirrels symbols of avarice in some Medieval bestiaries, but Victorian books of natural history often praised squirrels for their thrift.
Today, squirrels entertain urban dwellers with their spectacular leaps between trees or by running along telephone lines over busy streets. The hero shows this fearlessness in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by constantly, and unnecessarily, taunting an owl. Eventually, Nutkin is caught, and the owl nearly skins him alive, but he escapes after losing only a part of his tail.
In Britain today, the indigenous red squirrels are now endangered, due in part to diseases carried by grey squirrels, which were imported from North America. For many, the eradication of the grey squirrel has become a nationalistic cause, a matter of preserving British integrity from the cultural imperialism of the larger countries across the ocean. Since most of the remaining red squirrels are in Scotland, they are sometimes used as a symbol of Scottish nationalism. The red squirrel is a unique and very attractive animal, distinguished by large tufts of hair on its ears, and a very rich, reddish brown, color. All the same, it seems unfair to both red and grey squirrels, when they are made the focus of human disputes, in which they themselves have no part.
Every now and then, a squirrel will turn and stare at a person, with a gaze that suggests curiosity but neither fear nor anger. Because they seem completely untroubled by human presence, they reassure us that perhaps we have not alienated ourselves too much from the natural world after all.
FLEA, FLY, AND LOUSE
Little Fly
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away
Am I not
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
—WILLIAM BLAKE, “The Fly”
The authors of the ancient world generally did not distinguish sharply between the different types of small insects which might be a minor if persistent irritation, and the term “fly” is used here loosely as a general designation for them. In the Biblical book of Exodus, the fourth plague sent by Yahweh when the Pharaoh refused to release the Israelites was a plague of gadflies that filled the palaces, a particularly insulting punishment since these insects are generally are attracted to cattle. The Egyptians themselves, however, seem to have admired the appearance of houseflies, which they frequently used in decorative pins. Pendants of gold in the form of flies were awarded to soldiers for valor.
In the play Prometheus Bound by the tragedian Aeschylus, Hera changed the maiden Io into a heifer as punishment for having an affair with Zeus. Then the goddess sent a gadfly to drive the unfortunate creature across Europe and Asia. A similar image is used, though in a positive way, in Plato’s “Apology,” where Socrates compared himself to a gadfly sent by God to prod the Athenians out of their complaisance. In a similar spirit, the Greek poet Melegros called on a mosquito to go and buzz in the ear of his beloved to remind her of his love. In many cultures, especially in East Asia, insects have represented the soul. In Journey to the West, Ch’eng-en Wu’s mythological epic from late Medieval China, Old Monkey sometimes took the form of a fly to escape from demons or to elude detection.
Among the Montagnards of Vietnam, fireflies have traditionally been considered the spirits of departed heroes. In Japan and China, fireflies are the companions of impoverished scholars engaged in nocturnal study. Short poems, providing moments of illumination, which are written on fans or pieces of silk have been known as “fireflies.”
The name of the demon Beelzebub, originally a Phoenician deity, literally means “Baal of the Flies,” or “Lord of the Flies.” In the Old Testament, he tempted King Ahaziah of Israel away from Yahweh (2 Kings 1:2-6), and later he was called the “prince of devils” by Matthew and Mark. In the Christian Middle Ages, demons were frequently depicted as flies, and so people often thought of insectivorous birds such as swallows as holy. There are several stories of devils taking the form of insects in order to enter peoples’ bodies by flying into their mouths. According to a local chronicle, in 1559 a maiden near Joachimsthal in the Harz Mountains inadvertently swallowed an evil spirit, disguised as a fly, in her beer. The demon immediately possessed her and began to speak through her, though it was finally exorcised by the parish priest.
Before improvements in hygiene in the modern period, lice were often found in the hair and on the body of nearly everyone from king to peasant. Though a perpetual annoyance, they could also serve as a means of social bonding. To pick lice off a person was a service that might be performed by parents for children or servants for masters. It was even a ritual of courtship and love, performed by couples for one another. The presence of an inordinate number of lice might indicate either coarseness or, for ascetics, lack of worldly concern. Thus, Julian the Apostate, the austere Roman Emperor who attempted to revive paganism, once compared the lice running freely in his beard to wild beasts in a forest.
Fleas also tended to be thought of in a familiar and, at times, even in an affectionate way, though they were by far the most dangerous insects of the lot. It was not realized until the end of the nineteenth century, but fleas had been carriers of many diseases including bubonic plague. In the Renaissance, references to fleas became a humorous convention in poetic diction. Among the most famous is “The Flea” by John Donne, in which the author requests sexual favors from a woman by showing how their blood has mingled in the body of a flea:
Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
When the young woman kills the flea, the speaker concludes:
Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.
The words, however, certainly seem ironic in the perspective of today, when we know that fleas carried bubonic plague, which was entirely capable of wiping out entire villages in the early seventeenth century when this poem was written.
But insects, like rats, are now often put in the service of medicine. Apart from human beings and perhaps rodents, the droposphila fruit fly has become the most studied animal in the world. Scientists have found that the genetic code of the fruit fly is easy to manipulate and has many affinities with that of human beings. In the hope of correlating them with parts of the genome, all features of the creature’s life from anatomy to courtship dances have been intricately observed. Nicholar Wade, a journalist for The New York Times, has observed that researchers who study fruit flies “are easily provoked into confessing that they think of people as large flies without wings.”
HEDGEHOG
Not the phoenix, not the eagle, but the he’risson (hedgehog), very lowly, low down, close to the earth.
—JACQUES DERRIDA, Che cos’ è la poesia?
The Greek poet Archilochus wrote in the latter seventh century B. C. that, “The fox knows many tricks; the hedgehog knows only one. A great one.” Everybody understood that Archilochus meant the animal’s ability to elude predators by rolling itself into a ball, so that its quills would be facing in every direction. The broader meaning of the epigram, however, has puzzled readers for millennia. The poet had fought as a soldier, so perhaps he was thinking of a defensive military formation in which several soldiers with spears stand back to back in a circle. Perhaps the hedgehog may also have represented the poet’s native Sparta, where people specialized in war, while the fox represented more cosmopolitan cities such as Athens. At any rate, Archilochus clearly considered the defense of the hedgehog to be at least the equal of the wiles of the fox. The twentieth century British philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided thinkers into foxes like Tolstoy, distinguished by breadth of understanding, and hedgehogs like Dostoyevsky, distinguished by their depth.
Such thinkers were doubtless also fascinated by the singularity of hedgehogs, which may appear a bit like miniature porcupines (to which they are not closely related) but resemble no other animal. They are small, nocturnal insectivores that burrow in the earth and, as already noted, are covered with spikes. They sleep beneath the ground for long periods when food is not plentiful then eventually reemerge, which made the ancient Egyptians associate the hedgehog with the renewal of life. The Egyptians, who constantly had to contend with the bites of snakes and the stings of scorpions, also admired the resistance of hedgehogs to poisons. They often carried amulets in the form of a hedgehog for protection against venomous creatures.
But people have feared as well as admired the powers of this diminutive animal. In Europe, hedgehogs were taken for companions of witches during the Early Modern Period. In China as well, the hedgehog has had a reputation for necromancy; people believed that it lay concealed near roads to cast spells on unsuspecting travelers.
Human beings are, like hedgehogs, unique among animals, and so the strangeness of hedgehogs can make these animals easy for people to identify with. Aristotle reported in his Historia Animalia, that hedgehogs copulate belly to belly like human beings, since the spikes make it impossible for the male to mount the female from behind. Aristotle, Pliny, and Aelian reported that hedgehogs can anticipate changes in the direction of wind; accordingly, they block and open entrances to their burrows. In the Byzantine Empire, people sometimes attempted to predict the weather by observing the burrows of hedgehogs.
In European fairy tales, the hero is very often the “simpleton,” the child who at first seems too odd to participate in normal life. A fairy tale from the collection of the Brothers Grimm entitled “Hans my Hedgehog,” began as a farmer complained, “I want to have a child, even if it’s a hedgehog.” Soon his wife gave birth to Hans, human to the waist and a hedgehog above. Hans’ behavior was as strange as his appearance. He rode around on a rooster, played the bagpipes, and tended pigs in a forest. Though scorned and mistreated by people, Hans eventually managed to marry a beautiful princess and become fully human.
The hedgehog often appears as the proverbial “underdog” who manages to defeat a seemingly invincible opponent. In another tale from Grimm, the hedgehog challenges an arrogant hare to a race. After a few steps, the hedgehog slips beneath the ground. His wife, however, waits at the finish line, pretending to be her husband, and claims victory when the hare approaches. The tale concludes with a moral: “No person, no matter how superior he believes himself, should ever make fun of another, even if that other person is a hedgehog.”
In Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Twiggy-Winckle (1905), the central character is a hedgehog that embodies values such as charity and hard work, which are romantically associated with a bucolic, pre-Industrial English village. Once famed for its formidable defense, the hedgehog has now come to symbolize the vulnerability of nature in a technological world. Crushed or wounded hedgehogs are a regrettably frequent sight on European roads. The Prickly Ball Farm in southeast England near Exeter has established a hospital and a network of volunteers to care for and rehabilitate these injured animals.
In an essay entitled “What is poetry?” (Che cos’ è la poesia?), contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida compared a poem to a hedgehog that is thrown onto a street and curls up into a ball. In a similar manner, he maintained, a poem creates a self-contained world, which, however, exists amid terrible dangers. It may well be that Derrida, who himself is often accused of being solipsistic, identified with the proverbial hedgehog more than he cared to admit.
PIGEON
Pigeons in the grass, alas.
—GERTRUDE STEIN
Charles Darwin first theorized that pigeons were descended from rock doves, found along the Eurasian coasts, and this has recently been confirmed by genetic analysis. When people began to practice agriculture in Neolithic times, rock doves were attracted by the crops and extended their range, entering into a symbiotic relationship with humankind. They have been trained to carry messages from early times, and Greeks in the era of Homer used pigeons to announce the winners of the Olympic Games. Pigeons have been used to carry military communications, at least from ancient the era of ancient Greece and Rome up through World War I. In the sixteenth century, the Mughal Emperor Akbar kept an enormous colony of pigeons, which he bred largely for their appearance.
People have generally regarded the dove as sacred and the pigeon as utilitarian, but the two are somewhat conflated in Christian tradition, where the dove—sacralizing the pigeon’s role as a courier— becomes a messenger from God. The dove of the Annunciation was at times portrayed as a white rock dove, with a very broad fanlike tale rather than the narrower tail of the turtle dove and related varieties. Pigeons had been regularly eaten in the ancient world, but their culinary use may have later been partly inhibited by religious symbolism. In the modern era, pigeon meat has rarely been a staple, but people have turned to it in times of scarcity and war.
The passenger pigeons of North America, once so numerous that they darkened the skies, were driven to extinction in the early twentieth century. Now they are remembered as a symbol of human rapacity and the lost bounty of the New World. Poet Wallace Stevens probably had the passenger pigeon at least partially in mind when he wrote “Sunday Morning” in 1915. It closed with the lines:
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
But pigeons generally blend in so well with our urban environments that most people hardly even notice them. The few who do pay attention find much beauty in their enormous variety of patterns and tones, caused largely by the mixing of wild and feral birds. Pigeons thrive in cities because the facades of buildings resemble the stony landscapes of their original home.
Feeding pigeons and other birds as a recreation may be very old, and could go back to a sort of sacrifice. After World War II had ended and prosperity began to return, it became a tradition for tourists and their children in St. Mark’s Square in Venice and Trafalgar Square in London. It was a symbolic expression of benevolence, as well as a celebration of abundance, but both cities banned the activity on hygienic grounds as the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close.
Today, people often refer to pigeons contemptuously as “rats with wings.” There are small but devoted circles of pigeon fanciers, who race them and compete in shows. While lovers of many animals such as horses and cats tend to be female and aristocratic, pigeon enthusiasts are generally male and blue-collar. They identify with the toughness of these birds, which can survive easily on the most desolate coasts and in the roughest neighborhoods.
RAT AND MOUSE
Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
—ROBERT BROWNING, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
For the most part, rodents may be rivals and enemies of people, yet the two have a paradoxical intimacy, a bit like a married couple that cannot live in harmony yet find it impossible to separate. Rats and mice can adapt to a vast range of different environments, and they are quite capable of living without human beings. Nevertheless, they thrive particularly well in urban settings, where human beings inadvertently provide them with vast quantities of food and enclosures for shelter. As hosts of the fleas that carry plague, rodents may have killed untold millions of human beings in the course of human history. Even today, all our technologies cannot prevent rats and mice from devouring almost a quarter of the grain grown for human consumption. In the West, rats often appear in nightmares, and they can inspire revulsion and terror. Nevertheless, their ability to survive frequently earns grudging respect and admiration from people. In the Orient, rats are associated above all with prosperity, since they gather wherever food is plentiful. A Japanese proverb goes, “Getting rich is to invite the rat.”
Most of folklore up through at least the Renaissance distinguishes only loosely between rats and mice. In Greek and Latin, both animals were generally designated by the word “mus,” which is the origin of our word “mouse.” The word “rat” comes originally from the Vulgar Latin “rattus,” a term which probably originated in the Middle Ages. Like other pairs of closely related animals, such as lions and tigers, people have polarized these rodents as opposites, so that in the West the mouse has become beloved while the rat has become despised. In ancient manuscripts, people usually tend to translate the word “mus” according the whether rodents in question seem large and aggressive, like rats, or small and passive, like mice.
It was not until the nineteenth century that new techniques of construction enabled people to make buildings “ratproof”; prior to that, rodents were found in every structure from the barn to the royal palace. This produced a sort of intimacy with rats and mice, which may have softened the anger at the damage that they did. Rodents surely spoiled many meals and even destroyed homes, so it is remarkable that they were not often demonized in the ancient world. People might see rats and mice only occasionally, but they could hear them all the time, especially when falling asleep at night. They could not help but wonder, often with a certain sympathy, what transpired in the secret society on the other side of those holes in the wall.
One early attempt to imagine this is the fable known as “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” inserted by the Roman poet Horace in his Satire II. A country mouse once entertained a city mouse in his humble hole, offering him a few scraps of bacon and remains of vegetables. The city mouse would hardly deign to touch such fare. He explained to his rural companion that, since life was short, he should make the most of it by spending his time amid more pleasant surroundings. A little while later, the country mouse accepted the city mouse’s invitation to dinner. The host brought in course after course of fine dainties left over from a banquet the evening before. The guest was rejoicing in his good fortune, when, all of a sudden, somebody started banging on the doors, and the entire house trembled at the barking of two ferocious hounds. The terrified country mouse took his leave, saying he would rather live humbly in peace than risk his life for sumptuous delights. The fable, a classic expression of the contrast between the city slicker and the country bumpkin, has been constantly retold, often set in contemporary urban centers such as New York or London.
People are continually amazed at the ability of rodents to get food, no matter how carefully it seemed to be locked up. Up through the nineteenth century and even today, they have tried to explain this with countless anecdotes, in which admiration for the ingenuity of rodents almost always seems to cancel any resentment of them as pests. Many authors have described how one mouse or rat would lie on its back and hold an egg in its paws, in order to be dragged like a sled by colleagues. Others told how mice stood on the shoulders of one another to form a living ladder, in order to reach food on a table. Quite a few popular writers maintained that rodents had elaborate rituals and customs such as burying their dead.
But neither the affection for mice nor the admiration for ingenuity of rats could ever overcome the practical necessity of keeping the rodent population under control. The Egyptians sometimes depicted mice with affection, but they also kept mongooses and cats in their homes to catch rodents.
According to Herodotus, an Egyptian king named Sethos had once allienated the warrior class by claiming their ancestral lands. When the Assyrian Sennacherib invaded Egypt, the warriors refused to support him. The King, who was also a priest of the sun-god Ra, entered the inner sanctuary of the temple, prayed, and wept until he fell asleep. The god appeared to him in a dream and told him not to worry. He should gather whatever soldiers he could, even if they were only merchants or artisans, and go forth to face the enemy. The two armies were encamped opposite one another. On the night before the battle, a swarm of field mice entered the camp of the Assyrians. They devoured the bowstrings and quivers of the enemy, leaving them weaponless. A statue of Sethos was later erected in the temple of Ra. In his hand, the King held a mouse. The inscription read, “Look on me, and fear the gods.”
Since the lion is a symbol of kingship, it seems possible that that story may be the ultimate origin of the Aesopian fable, “The Lion and the Mouse,” told the by the Roman freedman Phaedrus and many others. A lion had caught a mouse, which begged to be let go, saying he might someday return the favor. The lion was so amused at the idea that so tiny a creature could ever help the king of beasts that he magnanimously lifted his paw and spared the mouse. A while later, hunters caught the lion in a trap. The mouse passed by and, seeing his friend struggling haplessly, gnawed away the ropes and set the lion free. The eternal rivalry between cat and mouse became a favorite theme of storytellers from the fables of Aesop to Tom-and-Jerry cartoons in twentieth century America. In one popular fable from the Middle Ages, the mice met in council to decide what they might do about the cat. They agreed that the greatest danger from the cat lay in the silence of his approach. One mouse proposed that a bell be tied around the neck of the cat to warn them of his approach. The members of the council applauded until one old mouse got up and asked, “Who will bell the cat?”
llustration to the fable of “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse” by Richard Heighway, 1910
C. S. Lewis used this motif in his novella The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where mice gnaw through ropes binding the lion Aslan, who represents Christ, to a stone table. Japanese tell how the Medieval painter Sesshu was once tied up during his childhood as punishment for idling away his time with art. He drew pictures of rats by moving his feet in the sand, which were so vivid that they came to life and gnawed his bonds.
A modern rendering of this theme is Edgar Allen Poe’s famous story, “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Rats had tormented a man who has been tied up in a dungeon by the Inquisition, but they ultimately liberated him by gnawing away his bonds. Like many stories of liberation by rats or mice, this tale can be read as an allegory about the emancipation of the soul at death. Because of their preference for human dwellings, rodents have often been taken for the souls of the departed. Because of their association with the next world, they are often credited with clairvoyance. According to a popular superstition, rats know when a ship is about to sink, and their leaving a ship is a sign of impending doom. The phrase “like rats leaving a sinking ship” is a scornful condemnation of those who abandon a cause at the first sign of danger.
In another Greco-Roman fable traditionally attributed to Aesop, a farmer once noticed that a mountain was rumbling, rocks were tumbling down, and dust was coming from its summit. He decided that the mountain was in labor, and he called his companions to see what it might give birth to. As they gazed on in fear and wonder, a tiny mouse finally emerged and came running down the slope. The story may well have originally referred to the emergence of the soul from the body. Sometimes a rodent also represents the separable soul, which can run about while a person is in a trance or asleep. In the Walpurgis Night episode in the first part of Goethe’s Faust, the protagonist dances with a young witch at a nocturnal revel, but he is horrified when a rat leaps out of her mouth and runs away. Today, however, people speak of how a “mountain labored and gave birth to a mouse” to describe disappointing results after a great effort.
This idea of rodents as the souls of human beings seems to underlie the mysterious tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which was recorded in several versions during the Middle Ages. In 1284 the town of Hameln in Germany became infested with rats, and the village council hired a brightly dressed piper to get rid of them. He played a mysterious tune that compelled the rats to follow him until he led them into the Weser River to drown. The Piper disappeared for a while, but he returned on Saint John’s day to demand the payment that had been promised to him. When the village refused to pay what the Piper wanted, he began to play his pipe again, and this time all of the village children followed him. A mountain opened up to receive the procession and closed up after it, so the children were never seen again. The Grimm Brothers made the story famous in their collection of German legends, and Robert Browning, Goethe, and others have retold it. Various scholars have traced the tale back to the bubonic plague, to the Children’s Crusade of the Middle Ages, or to a German migration southwards to Bohemia. However that may be, the image of the Piper with the children or rats greatly resembles Medieval representations of Death leading the departed in a dance.
There is also at least a very strong association between rodents and the dead in the legend of Bishop Hatto of Mainz, Germany. There was a famine, but Hatto continued to dine in luxury, and refused requests from the poor and hungry to lower the prices on his ample store of grain. Finally, weary of hearing the starving people complain, he invited all who lacked bread to assemble in a huge barn. Then, instead of offering food, he set the barn on fire and burned his visitors to death, while scornfully comparing them to rats. Next morning, the Bishop rose and saw that rats had eaten his portrait. A servant informed him that rats had eaten everything in the granary. He looked out over his lands to see a huge army of rats descending on the palace. In terror, the Bishop fled to an island in the Rhine and locked himself up in a structure known today as the “Mouse Tower.” The rats followed, gnawed through the door, and finally ate up the villain alive.
The perspective on rats in East Asia is far more unequivocally positive. A legend tells that when the Buddha was near death all the animals came to pay their last respects. The ox was leading the way, when the rat hitched a ride upon its back. As they reached the pavilion where Buddha lay, the rat jumped down, raced ahead, and arrived before the other animals. As a reward for its piety, the Buddha granted the rat the first position in the Chinese zodiac.
Daikoku, the Buddhist god of wealth is often depicted holding a large bale of rice, at which rats nibble. These rodents serve him as messengers. The amazing fertility of rodents makes them symbolic of the way money can increase through good business, though even Daikoku has sometimes had to guard his store from rats.
In the Middle Ages, rats were sometimes viewed as familiars of witches or forms in which sorcerers ran about at night. However, it was not until some centuries after the worst episodes of the bubonic plague that we start to see intense expressions of aversion and disgust for rats, as people gradually began to suspect their connection with disease.
The reputation of rats took a drastic turn for the worse at the end of the nineteenth century when the French missionary Paul Louis Simmond announced that bubonic plague had been caused by a bacillus that was found on fleas carried by rats. The disease may have been around since the advent of humankind, and one of the first likely references to it is in the Bible. In the early eleventh century BCE, the Philistines had defeated the Hebrews and taken the Ark of the Covenant. “The hand of Yahweh weighed heavily on the people of Ashdod (Philistines) and struck terror in them, afflicting them with tumors”(1 Samuel 5:6). Outbreaks of the plague gradually became more common and more severe with the growth of trade and the increasing density of population during the Roman Empire. The plague of Justinian in 531-532 CE killed tens of millions, depopulating entire towns, but the most terrible outbreak of all was in 1348-50, when bubonic plague destroyed over one third of the population of Europe. New research, carried out by epidemiologists in the early twenty first century, has, however, seriously placed in question whether rats were the major carriers of fleas with the deadly bacillus, which could also have been spread by other means including voles and direct human contact.
The plague had also sometimes been blamed on Jews, and thousands of them were burned alive in the Middle Ages in consequence. In the latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rats have often been used in anti-Semitic propaganda. Cartoonists made the proverbial “Jewish nose” appear like the snout of a rat. In the Nazi propaganda film “The Eternal Jew,” directed by Fritz Hippler, the migrations of Jews were compared to the spread of rats across the world. The physician Hans Zinsser, doubtless thinking of the two world wars, has observed that the conflict between the brown rat, indigenous throughout Eurasia, and the black rat, brought to Western Europe on the boats of crusaders, was a very close equivalent to armed conflict among human beings. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the fate most dreaded fate by the hero Winston is to be eaten by rats.
As the rat has been demonized, the mouse, as though in compensation, has generally grown more beloved. In 1923 Walt Disney, then a struggling entrepreneur, introduced the first animated film starring Mickey Mouse as “Steamboat Willie,” a captain who raucously hooted and danced as he steered his ship. As Disney Studios grew into a giant corporation, Mickey became more subdued and, in the eyes of his critics, even bland. The Mickey Mouse Club was founded as part of the television show “Walt Disney Presents.” It featured boys and girls wearing caps with large mouse ears who sang, danced, and had adventures.
Meanwhile, medicine has increasingly placed mice and rats in the service of humankind, as the subjects of medical experiments. In 1988 the first patent ever was issued for an animal other than microorganisms. The “onco-mouse” was genetically engineered to develop cancer so it may be used in research. Over twenty million rodents, perhaps far more, are killed in American laboratories every year, and the scale of this use is probably increasing. To see what treatment is right for an individual patient, doctors now use mice as personal avatars, by simulating the patient’s condition as closely as possible in the laboratory animal. In some cases, bacteria from a human patient’s stomach are transplanted into mice, so doctors can experiment with different treatments. Eventually, researchers hope that rodent avatars will even produce customized immune cells, which can be injected into an ailing man or woman. This may create an unprecedented intimacy between the patient and the laboratory animal, since the rodent dies for its human double, in a way that is too direct and immediate to ignore.