For the Love of Lab Rats: Kinship, Humanimal Relations, and Good ...

boundary problems in the way that structuralists such as Douglas (1966) did, she did argue that vermin animals are often located at the cusp of boundaries that trouble the material conditions of life. Fissell (1999) noted in particular that at this time,

But rats and mice also bear a much more modern menace; they have not been banished to the sewers and the drains of the past. They infiltrate people’s material and technological worlds, threatening the ease with which people communicate. With their penchant for chewing, rats and mice nibble and gnaw at the cords and cables that link modern technologies, disabling modern machines and modern e-mail and telephone communication systems. And, ‘vermin’ mice are, of course, now material technological mice; they have penetrated the worlds of people’s desks, where they sit in the midst of people’s technological mastery of modern machines. Their metaphorical and actual—and often destructive—intertwinement with modern communications technologies has also meant that despite the best efforts of humans to relegate rats and mice to the past through a variety of exterminatory methods (exercised largely in the shadow of the spectre of the plague that was unfairly blamed on rats), they have kept pace with humans and undermine the advances the ‘modern’ species has accomplished (Ellmann, 2004). Mice and rats, as much as they are associated with the old panics of plague and disease, are equally thoroughly modern animals. As much as they are modern, they persist in the historically loaded category of ‘vermin’. Whereas other animals that were once classified as such, including the heron, the kingfisher, the otter, and the osprey, have all been transferred to more positive categories (see Fissell, 1999, p. 1), humans have continued to array the animal world in such a way as to leave mice and rats where they are—as vermin. Such historical determination on the part of humans has not meant that rats have stayed put, however.