| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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to be Australia. As I discovered after numerous visits to pet stores across two Australian states, it is not unusual for little children to coo over the rats that are displayed in glass cases in city pet stores the way they do over puppies and kittens, and it is not unusual for them to make pleas to their parents to take one special individual home. It is not unusual, either, based on my observations over the last 12 months, for the parents of these pleading children to in fact agree to take home a carefully chosen individual from the glass case. Equally prominent in my observations, though, were expressions of disgust from visitors to the pet store about the presence of ‘vermin’ there. ‘Rats and mice belong in traps’, suggested one outraged visitor.
The comment I overheard in the pet store, that ‘rats and mice belong in traps’, was very interesting to me, primarily because I overheard it in the pet store, a place in which humans seek on many occasions to begin a close relationship with an animal.3 Alongside the domestic elimination of rats and mice and the big business of rodent extermination persists the practice of keeping pet mice and rats, which can be taught to perch aloft a shoulder or even to recognise their own names being called. As I will show in the second chapter, the inquisitive and charming pet rat which answers its owner’s summons or which takes its place in an exhibition of fancy animals is the same species that spreads fearsome disease in the dark places of the house. The little mouse, too, running around a wheel in a pet cage, is essentially the same mouse that is flung unceremoniously out of a trap, having finally been caught and dispensed with.
The dual location of rats and mice as pets and pests generates a generalised situation in which there might occur around rats and mice the simultaneous existence of opposed and conflicting attitudes (ambiguity) and/or a situation in which rats and mice embody vague or uncertain meanings (ambivalence). Both are yielded from the capacity of these animals to simultaneously occupy polar reaches of the Western imagination. This imagination can be traced back at least as far as Victorian times, when the monarch herself kept a piebald rat in a delicate gilded cage, as did the ladies of her court, at the very same time that she kept in her permanent employ the royal rat-catcher Jack Black. Black provided