The Tattered Coat » Print

Rats!

Posted By Matt On 31st January 2005 @ 11:52 In Books, Movies, Music, Television | 1 Comment

I just started reading Robert Sullivan’s Rats : Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, and I have a feeling that I’m going to be tantalizing you with strange and digusting relevations as I make my way through the book.

I’m only two chapters in, and already I have a disturbing passage to share with you:

Rats succeed while under constant seige because they have an astounding rate of reproduction. If they are not eating, then rats are usually having sex. Most likely, if you are in New York while you are reading this sentence or even in any other major city in America, then you are in proximity to two or more rats having sex. Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day, and a male rat will have sex with as many female rats as possible—-according to one report, a dominant male rat may mate with up to twenty female rats in just six hours. (Male rats exiled from their nest by more aggressive male rats will also live in all-male rat colonies and have sex with the other male rats.)

What a great paragraph–each sentence makes you gag, and it gets worse and worse, taking you to ever increasing depths of nausea. Twenty times a day! That’s a lot of lovin’. And what, exactly, is a “healthy” amount of garbage?

I can already tell that reading this book on the heels of Steve Almond’s Candyfreak is going to be a strange experience. (If you love candy, by the way, you must read Candyfreak). More on that later, in a post that I promise will be 100% free of rodent sex.