Afraid of rats? Don’t worry, Joe Shute was too, but he’s since dedicated his new book to his pet rats “Molly and Ermintrude, my friends among rogues’. Shute started his event with “all the bad news out straight away”. Stories of rats’ notorious food-antics spread even to Shute’s own allotment, where two ears of sweetcorn were devastated by them (a location he would later bury one of his own pet rats as the place reflected her “mischievous spirit”).
Rats have been mythologised to be these nightmarish monsters, but Shute accurately pointed out that we’ve spent a lot of energy trying to eradicate them with dangerous pesticides rather than understand them. Rats are sacrificed more than any other animal to benefit human health and our history is intertwined with them, yet we’ve never appreciated the characteristics we share with rats, such as how we both enjoy music best at 180 bpm (tell me you don’t find a little rat bobbing its head to Queen cute).
One of the best parts was Shute’s story of his first rat colony at home and how he worked through his own fear of rats to see them “on their own terms”. I found myself aww-ing the same way I would towards a puppy when he described how playful the rats were and how they giggle when tickled. Shute also made me want to use the adjective ‘ratty’ in everyday life when he described that his pets were “best friends but in a ratty way”. The image of the “great ratty heap” of his rats snuggled together sleeping felt like it was the heart of his message.
It was lovely to hear so much about Sheffield too, as Shute lives locally and even got his rats from a breeder off Abbeydale Road. He told us about some of “Sheffield’s rattiest locations” and the medical rat skeletons found in the Castlegate dig site. Shute also toured the world to discover more about these incredible creatures, discussing (in the incredibly-named section ‘A tail of two cities’) the pockets of genetically distinct rat colonies in Paris: “like crime families in the city.”
The Q&A proved true Shute’s statement that “[R]at stories are like ghost stories: everybody has one” as audience members discussed their own encounters, be it bidding a rat-trespasser good morning when hungover, or asking how to persuade a boyfriend that a rat is a great pet (the advice from another attendee was “just get one”). We also discussed the arrogance in our use of the word “vermin”, also used in relation to ravens, the subject of Shute’s book A Shadow Above: The Fall and Rise of The Raven, as even hedgehogs were once classed as such.
Shute made us fall in love with rats, even if we’re still a little scared of them. In looking for ways to coexist with them, we can examine our own rattiness and work towards creating better environments for both of us.
Rating: ★★★★★
Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat was published in April 2024. Other Off the Shelf Festival events can be found here
