Bethany Brookshire
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Especially now with the advent of CRISPR technologies that allow us to alter adult genetics and fetal genetics, we established that first in mice. We can do it in rats now, but it's very, very well established in mice. And so that really took off.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Yes. In my experience, rats are better for self-administration of drugs. So if you want an animal to press a lever and receive a drug, a rat is generally the better choice because of size. Because mice are so small, it's really hard to make a lever that they can press well enough.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
I studied primarily drugs of abuse in graduate school, and then I studied antidepressants for my postdoc.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Ritalin, cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, alcohol, Prozac. If you want to be really nerdy about it, I studied the dopamine-serotonergic interactions in the ventral tegmental area nucleus accumbens circuit of the mouse brain.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Yeah. So I was interested in drugs that primarily targeted dopaminergic systems.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
I was interested in chronic high-dose administration of methylphenidate, which is Ritalin. You know, humans, we give people Ritalin starting at very young ages. So I was very interested in what chronic exposure to these drugs means for the brain as you get older. Does it make you more or less susceptible to drug addiction?
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
It's tough to say. I did show that in some animals you get tolerance to other drugs that are similar. In some you get sensitization, so they're more sensitive to the effects. You also get transferral, so different drugs that don't necessarily primarily hit that pathway will begin to hit that pathway.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
I can say that, for example, in the area where I was looking, which is a group of structures that we call the basal ganglia, there's a lot of similarity between basal ganglias across all mammals, heck, across like reptiles. It's when you get into kind of higher order stuff that things get more different. Certainly there are drastic differences in things like the immune system, but...
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
I do strongly feel that rats and mice are really essential to our understanding of the human body and the human brain.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Mice and rats have become very popular research animals in part because they were actually sold that way. C.C. Little, who founded the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, which is one of the world's biggest purveyors of mice for scientific purposes, he wrote a piece in Scientific American selling the mouse as a lab animal to the public. The opening line was, do you like mice? Of course you don't.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
He basically said, mice are awful and we hate them, but they could be heroes of medicine.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
It can be a replacement for other animals that we are currently using. At that time, dogs were a really big research animal. He proposed mice as being, you know, cheaper, faster. They do have all of those things. We have amazing abilities to alter their genetics now. But all of that stems from the fact that we consider them pests. We consider them expendable.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Yes. Hundreds. And I feel bad about it. At the same time, you know, they worked really hard for me. They worked hard for me. I liked working with them. Rats are much sweeter than mice, by the way. If you're gonna have one as a pet, have a rat. Mice I like because mice are honest. Mice don't like you. They're never gonna like you. Rats like you.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
You pick one up and after a while they snuggle into you. They'll like snuggle in your armpit or your elbow or they'll get on your neck. They're sweet and they're smart. They make great pets, honestly.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Yeah, that's Magrat is her name. And she is not mine. And sadly, she has since passed away because rats don't live very long. But she was a wonderful model. She did not pee on me the entire time. I was shocked.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
I absolutely think the way we see animals in media can strongly affect our perception. I've been able to learn from my own research that rats are absolutely not public enemy number one everywhere.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
They don't have to be the villain that we see them as. They could be something else. And the good news is that humans can change their minds. We do it all the time. So we could do it with rats too. I love the movie Ratatouille. I love that movie because not only do I like rats, I love food. I've never yet been able to make that picture perfect Ratatouille that Remy makes. It never looks that good.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
If you want an animal to press a lever and receive a drug, a rat is generally the better choice.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
The fact that we're so quick to blame the rat says a lot about us.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
I'm the author of the 2022 book, Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Oh, man. Pests, the word, does so much work in our society just in general. It has become a word for animals that are not where we want them to be. And that was one of the things that I became really fixated on, is the fact that the animals that we hate... Are so subjective. The animals are just being animals. They're about us.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
They're about where we think animals belong and what we think those animals should be doing.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
I don't know that it's been unfairly tarnished. I certainly think there was probably a place for it. I do think the fact that we're so quick to blame the rat says a lot about us because the reality is the thing that causes most diseases in humans, like communicable diseases, is other humans, right? We're the major vectors of disease to each other.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
The pigeon became domesticated around 8,000 years ago, we think, which makes it one of the earliest domesticated birds. Pigeons were cornerstones of many societies. They were incredibly important, not just for food, though we absolutely ate them. If you've never had squab, I highly recommend. It's delicious. We used them as messengers. And in fact, we decorated pigeons that served in war.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Pigeons were used to carry messages. And one of my favorite things is that pigeons were the foundation of modern journalism.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Yeah. How so? When the wire service Reuters started, it was not on a wire. It was on the wing. It was on the pigeon because Reuters figured out he could fly hot stock tips to and from Aachen and beat the train by two hours. And of course, we also use them for their poop. Because pigeon poop is excellent fertilizer and there's wonderful dove coats.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
You can still see some of them today developed by the ancient Persians that are these beautiful bell shapes so that all the poop falls to the bottom and you can scoop it.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Yeah, there's a wonderful piece of work by Colin Jerelmack who actually documented the fall of the pigeon in the public eye via articles in the New York Times over a century. And he was able to document that over about 100 years, pigeons went from noble, innocent, beautiful to rats with wings. You know, we no longer needed fertilizer. We have chemical fertilizer now.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
We don't need messengers anymore. We have email. And we don't need squab anymore. We have chicken.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
I would say the history of the human-pigeon relationship differs in that we once had a use for the pigeon. I think of the pigeon as kind of the outdated cell phone of the animal world, right? We used to have such a use for them. And now we don't, and we can't fathom why they won't go away. It's so sad.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Well, there are plenty of downsides associated with rats. People don't like them. They find them both physically and psychologically really stressful. People who live very closely with rats, it's awful. No one should have to live that way. Rats give people feelings of unsettledness, right? They are very associated with our feelings of disgust.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
And I'm saying that in terms of Western cultures, in terms of like the global North. Other cultures do not associate rats with disgust.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
So the Temple of Karni Mata, it's located in Deshnokhe, India. This temple houses around 25,000 black rats. And those rats are considered sacred. They are holy. I got to speak to some of the people who help run the temple, who cook the food for the rats. It's a beautiful temple. It has solid silver doors carved with rats. There are beautiful marble floors for the rats.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
The rats drink from beautiful decorated bowls of milk, huge bowls of milk. They eat a wonderfully healthy diet. They get whole wheat, bread, like whole bran. They get fruit, vegetables. And people come to make fire and food offerings to these rats. It's because the rats are not considered to be real rats. The rats are reincarnations of people.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
So the legend is that this woman, Karni Mata, grew up in that area and she grew up to be a sage. She had mystical powers. And so when her sister's son passed away, he drowned while playing, her sister brought her the boy and begged her to bring him back. And Karni Mata interceded with Yama, the god of death. And Yama said, okay, the people from your family will no longer die.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
They will be reincarnated as rats. And then those rats, when they die, will again be reincarnated as people. And so now that temple, the family does still worship there, and it has been several hundred years. But other people, devotees, worship there as well because they believe that they will also be blessed if they are devoted enough to be reincarnated as these rats.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
I would say there are a couple of things. There is one angle that's very cultural, right? I ended up interviewing for my book a bunch of people who worked in biblical scholarship. We ended up talking about translations and our understandings of things like Genesis. And God gave people dominion over the animals.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
And that has become very deeply ingrained in many of our cultural ideas of what we should be able to control and how we should be able to control it. I would say that's one of the reasons that we hate these animals is because we expect animals around us to fail. We are prepared for that.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
We move into an area, we pave it over, we put up a Walmart, a Target, a Starbucks, a McDonald's, what have you, and we expect the animals to leave. And then we wring our hands. We are so upset. We have killed off this beautiful species. This species becomes beautiful. It becomes charismatic. It becomes this wonderful thing. And look at the horrible stuff we've done to it.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
But when an animal is still there, we're kind of mad. We don't like it. It's now where we've decided it doesn't belong, even if it always lived there. Now it's our space. You don't belong there anymore. And we get really upset, especially if the animals begin to thrive and especially if they thrive off things we value, right? Our gardens, our crops, our cats. We really hate them.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
We hate their success because their success feels like our failure, right?
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
That's actually something I got a lot when I was writing the book is it's humans. Humans are the real pests. We're the ones invading the world and taking it over and making it awful. I think that's too easy because it's the sort of thing that makes you fling up your hands and be like, oh, there's nothing I can do.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
We have choices in the way that we treat other animals and we have choices in the way we treat each other. And we don't need to live the way that we always have.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
We really hate them. We hate their success because their success feels like our failure.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
There's a whole 99-page report about how we're going to do that. But we will also hear from rat lovers. Eventually, because you're feeding it, because it's a little bit lovely, you end up feeling some warmth towards it. And what you might call rat exonerators.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Because everybody who hates rats wants to name them after somebody they don't like.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
So basically the name stuck because somebody was picking a fight with Norway at the time.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Europe was very black rat dominated until we think the 17th or 18th centuries when we began to see the brown rat. That is native to what we think of as Mongolia. Rattus norvegicus ended up getting spread into Europe. And then with colonialism, it just went everywhere else because rats and boats go together real good.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Interestingly, people have not liked rats, but they didn't necessarily consider them disgusting until about the 18th or 19th century. People didn't like them because they were a problem of the food supply, right? They would get in and they would eat your food and nobody wants that.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
But they weren't considered to be disgusting in terms of they weren't considered to carry disease for a very long time. The association of rats with disease is a relatively recent one.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
It intersects with the plague, but not when you think it does. So there have been three major pandemics of plague that we know of in recorded history. The first was the Plague of Justinian, which I believe was in the 6th century. The second was the Black Death, which was famous and began in the 14th century. The third global pandemic of bubonic plague is now.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
It began in the 19th century, but it persists even now. Actually, people every year in the United States, in Mongolia and in Madagascar in particular get plague.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
The bubonic plague is technically not a disease of humans. It is a disease of rats and fleas that happens to spill over into humans from time to time with catastrophic effects.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
What we do know is that fleas get Yersinia pestis and then the bacteria forms a biofilm inside the esophagus of the rat flea. And the biofilm coats the esophagus so that the rat flea can't swallow. It's just biting and biting and biting and biting, but it can't swallow anything and it starves to death.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
And you start to feel really bad for the flea until you realize that everything it bites, it's barfing up little bits of bacteria into the bite, spreading plague. So that's how plague is traditionally transmitted.