Rats Rats Rats
Rat populations across the globe are rising. Historically, “the growth of human populations […] has meant the growth of a nearly equivalent global population of rats”. However, catalysed by Covid-19 - when rats could explore hotels, restaurants, shops, warehouses, and factory floors human-free - and aided by milder winters, their populations have surged. Often, we are repulsed by, even sacred of, rats. In the ultra-urbanised 21st century, rodents are usually emblematic of disease, poverty, and filth. Increased populations will bring rats into public and private spaces more frequently, rats which because of high-protein diets, have grown larger and heavier than their rural counterparts. The larger and more profuse urban rat is becoming increasingly visible as we further urbanise, and climate change warms our planet. Whilst our ecological knots are being untied, rats have become a reminder of the climates collapse and the failings of capitalist urbanism.
The United Kingdom, from where this is written, will provide the exemplar late-capitalist state with a rat problem. Significant data about rat populations has been collected here over the last three years by the British Pest Control Association (BPCA) and other associated groups. The BPCA represents 700 pest catchers across United Kingdom and has reported a 51% hike in rat numbers during the first lockdown of spring 2020, and a 78% increase in November after the second lockdown. In 2022, according to a Direct Line Group report, local councils in the United Kingdom “dealt with 225,430 residential rodent infestations”, which equates to 618 a day. The BPCA estimate that there are “anywhere between 10.5 million and 120 million” rats in the UK.
The surge in rat population is contiguous with human-caused environmental collapse, both of which speak directly to our fear of decay, which is often expressed most fervently by large, organised societies. Rats manifest our collective unease with disorder as we confront the environmental destruction that capitalist modernity has caused. As rats become more visible, so do the effects of ecocide.
The United Kingdom accounts for 3% of the total human caused CO2 emissions, created from within the home country, despite comprising only 0.85% of the global population. In the Waste Atlas, the United Kingdom (which is the 22nd most populace nation on earth) ranks 33rd in the world for waste generated per capita, 11th in municipal waste generation and 23rd for environmental stress caused. The contemporary and historical volume of industrial, agricultural, and personal waste produced by the UK - as well as greenhouses gases other than CO2 - also increase the nations negative contributions to the climate emergency. These figures do not account for the pollution generated by British colonialism and the export of capitalism by the neo-liberal state, which of course inform the UK’s total contributions to our current ecological disaster.
Large, and growing, populations of rats are the inevitable outcome of over-urbanisation and enormous levels of climate-changing-pollution produced by capitalist states and organisations. “By 2050, almost 70% of all people will live in cities. These densely packed cities will inevitably proliferate the resources that support commensal or anthropo-dependent wildlife – especially rodents”. The number of rats will carry on increasing if climate change is not abated and whilst urban centres continue to become ever more centralising.
The UK’s specific relationship to the climate crises, has seen “hundreds of new oil and gas licences” granted by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Whilst, as the Guardian newspaper revealed, that same government decides to “drop the UK’s flagship £11.6bn climate and nature funding pledge”. Whilst the opposition Labour party refuses to commit to renewing the £11.6bn climate funding pledge. And that same party postpones its £28bn pledge to tackle the climate crisis, under the auspice of gaining fiscal trust from the public. Whilst all this is true - and much more happens besides - the urban rodent population in the UK will grow. The rat is an “interspecies figure of politics and [a] living creature”; unbeknownst to the rodent or, it seems, parliament, rat populations are currently tied to the decisions of a polity wilfully destroying our planet.
The United Kingdom is a significant part of what is an international crisis. However, this is a crisis couched in the actions of a few powerful individuals, organisations, and states. For them the rising rodent populations are not conceptually – according to their public face, at least - associated with the climate emergency. The hegemony sees rats as an inconsequential animal used for experimentation or met with extermination. This positioning imagines the abuse and killing of rodents to be ethical, despite contrary indications, and the broad reduction of their use in experiments. Rodents, especially rats, are politically undesirable. The presence of urban rats – particularly in large populations - pull down the obfuscating barricades which would otherwise disguise the failings of our capitalist hegemony. Rats, for their efforts, express that failing.
Author and researcher, Rafi Youatt, considers there to be “three axes around which rat assemblages have been formed – exterminative, experimental, and ecological” and the politics of the rat then intersects with each of these axes. The rodent has become a symbol of the failings of capitalism and its systemic tendency to perform the role of an arsonist firefighter. Setting ablaze its own infrastructure to impose itself a new: rebuilding, reframing, reimagining its oppressive force each time, to increase its hegemonic force and impose stricter hierarchies each time. However, capitalism is a political methodology which is ultimately self-destructive, as, in the end, it will create a problem it has no way of solving. At present, it seems possible that the climate crisis might be such a problem. Rat populations are functionally uncontrollable, just as climate change is becoming. Each new catastrophic event replicates itself and causes further disaster; just as a rat breeds, so the ecological dominoes fall.
Image generated using AI
