The Social History and Domestication of Rats

Are rats pets or pests, friends or foes? Rats and humans have a rich history of interaction. Rats have found ways to take advantage of human agriculture, infrastructure, and waste, while humans have found ways to use rats for research, companionship, and even military purposes. There are also negative ways we interact such as rats being vectors for disease and humans constantly trying to kill off rat populations with poison and traps.

Before rats were domesticated by humans, our two species already had frequent interactions. When humans began shifting from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to lifestyles of agriculture, that opened the door for many human-rat interactions. Rats have been living in the homes of humans, eating food from human farms, and eating food stored in man-made structures for thousands of years, and they continue to do so. Anyone living in large cities can attest to the fact that rats love living in close proximity with humans, and they always find a way into our homes, food, and trash.

Rats living in close proximity with humans have caused many problems throughout history. They often eat our food and trash and contaminate our living spaces with their feces. Rats eat crops we grow and even agriculture animals like baby chickens. They have also been a major vector of disease throughout history. The most noteworthy case of this is the bubonic plague, but rats are also vectors for many other diseases including Hantavirus, Leptospirosis, Salmonella (CDC, 2023). Because of these reasons, rats have gained a reputation among humans as a pest species.


A rat emerging from a trash bag after scoring a delicious lunch.
Source: https://www.colonialpest.com/2014/12/29/where-do-rats-nest/

Due to their reputation as a pest species, humans have developed many ways of killing, trapping, and keeping rats out of their spaces. The first mention of rat traps was somewhere between the 6th through 4th centuries BCE in an ancient Greek text called the Batrachomyomachia ("The History of Rat Traps", 2021). The first technical description of a mousetrap wasn't until 1894 when William Chauncey Hooker patented the first rat/mousetrap in the United States (Dagg, 2011).


W. C. Hooker's Rat/Mouse Trap Patent from 1894
Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mousetrap-patent-loaded-gun/

Rat poisons are another method humans historically and currently employ to kill rats in their homes and farms. Like traps, rat poisons have been around for a long time. The earliest documented rat poison brand became available all the way back in the 1850s (MacGregor, n.d.). Despite the innovations humans have come up with throughout the years, efforts to control rats have been largely unsuccessful. Rats are still a prominent pest species in densely populated areas to this day.

Despite rats being a major pest species, humans have found ways to use them for entertainment. For example, rats have been kept as decorative/companion pets for a long time. "The earliest evidence for a form of rat domestication comes from Japan where a tradition of keeping fancy rats emerged during the Edo period (1603 to 1868)" (Hulme-Beaman et al., 2021). Fancy rats were selectively bred for aesthetic traits that were desirable for pet owners at the time. Later on during the early 1800s, people bred rats in Europe for blood sports. In this case, rats were bred to be slaughtered en masse by dogs in timed competitions for entertainment.


A: Drawings of rat cages and various fancy rat color patterns from 18th century Japan.
B: European rat blood sports
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Panel-of-domestic-rats-A-Composite-image-of-rat-and-mouse-keeping-cages-from-the_fig1_352552442

In modern times, the use of rats in blood sports has ceased, but domesticated rats are still kept as pets. In fact, their use as pets is more popular than ever. According to one study, "approximately 100,000 lived in 2019 in the UK alone" (Schweinfurth, 2020). They are very smart and social creatures that are capable of bonding with humans very well. They can be trained to do tricks and respond to prompts, and they are overall very cute pets.


Cute pet rats
Source: https://www.peta.org/teachkind/humane-classroom/rabbits-rodents-classroom-pets/

In addition to using rats as pets, humans also use them for research purposes. According to a paper by Klaudia Modlinska and Wojciech Pisula, "the first known documented experiment conducted on these animals was a study of the effects of adrenalectomy published in 1856 in France" (Modlinska & Pisula, 2020). Since then, rats have become one of the most commonly used research animals. In the U.S. alone, about "111.5 million rats and mice [are] used per year" (Carbone, 2021). Concrete data is not available on how many of these rats and mice undergo painful experiments, but one study estimates that number to be 44.5 million (Carbone, 2021). Rats used in research are often subjected to inhumane conditions and experiments, however rat research has also led to some of the most influential discoveries in medicine that have vastly improved human lives.


Research rat receiving an intramuscular injection.
Source: https://researchanimaltraining.com/articles/intramuscular-injection-in-the-rat/

In addition to their use as pets and research animals, humans have even found ways to use rats for military purposes. An organization called APOPO has been training and using rats to detect landmines. Their keen sense of smell and light weight make rats perfect animals for detecting landmines since they are not heavy enough to trigger them. One of APOPO's retired rats name Magawa has detected over 100 landmines during his service in Cambodia (De Guzman, 2022). Magawa died six months after he retired, but his legacy lives on as he has undoubtedly prevented many people from losing their lives due to old land mines.


Magawa receiving a treat for sniffing out a land mine
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rat-called-magawa-awarded-prestigious-gold-medal-cambodia-landmine-detection-n1241050

Rats have a long and complicated history of interactions with humans. They are both heroes and villains, pets and pests. Their sacrifices in research have led to countless life-saving innovations in medicine, and their status as disease vectors has led to countless human deaths. Rats have caused humans lots of suffering and likewise, humans have done the same to rats. On the other hand, rats and humans have also helped each other out a lot. Rats benefit from our farms, food, and warm houses, and we benefit from their loving companionship as pets, their use in research, and their heroic acts in landmine detection. The threads of history of rats and humans are thoroughly intertwined and will likely continue to be for a long time.

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