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

Queen Victoria and the ladies of her court with their spoiled and pampered pets from stock constituted of rats he collected in the course of his extermination work.⁴ The Western affection for rats and mice, then, was present in the very same historical moment as the hatred for them and the determination to eliminate them was at fever pitch, when Jack Black made a very handsome return every year for eliminating them in the thousands. This same duality persists in the outraged comments that are made in the modern pet store, wherein rats are dually locatable as ‘pets’ and as ‘vermin’ which ‘belong in traps’. Further, affection and loathing were and continue to be directed towards essentially the same rat or mouse body; nothing, besides the appealing piebald colours of Queen Victoria’s companion, distinguished her pet rat from the vermin she ordered eliminated from London’s sewers.

Old Foes, Modern Mice

Vermin mice and rats are also temporally ambiguous, despite Western attempts to locate their impact on humankind firmly in the past.⁵ Ellmann (2004) has argued that rats are particularly threatening to modernism because they come to ‘stand for the resurgence of the undead past’ (p. 60). Where, for example, Ellmann noted that Joyce’s Ulysses rat is an ‘obese grey grandfather chewing on corpses’ (p. 60; Joyce, 1922), the modern rat is hardly less impactful, chewing and nibbling as it does on the cables, wires, and pipes of the contemporary world. One might have thought—mistakenly, as it turns out—that the old rat persisted only because in the past, people exercised a lesser control over the sewers, pipes, and drains, the areas below the waist of the Victorian streetscape. The location of rats and mice in these dirty places spoke both to their capacity to spread diseases and to the dirtiness of their animal sexuality, conducted as it was to the extent that plague proportions of rats resulted under the London streets upon which ladies and gentlemen promenaded in all their finery (see Edelman, 2002, pp. 5–6). Fissell (1999) noted that vermin animals, including rats and mice, also occupied other ambiguous domains in Restoration England. Although Fissell did not cast vermin as