To most people, the rat is vile and villainous. But not to everyone! We hear from a scientist who befriended rats and another who worked with them in the lab — and from the animator who made one the hero of a Pixar blockbuster. (Part three of a three-part series, “Sympathy for the Rat.”) SOURCES:Bethany Brookshire, author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal VillainsJan Pinkava, creator and co-writer of "Ratatouille," and director of the Animation Institute at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg.Julia Zichello, evolutionary biologist at Hunter College. RESOURCES:"Weekend Column: Rat’s End, or, How a Rat Dies," by Julia Zichello (West Side Rag, 2024).Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire (2022)."Rats: the history of an incendiary cartoon trope," by Archie Bland (The Guardian, 2015)."Catching the Rat: Understanding Multiple and Contradictory Human-Rat Relations as Situated Practices," by Koen Beumer (Society & Animals, 2014)."Effects of Chronic Methylphenidate on Dopamine/Serotonin Interactions in the Mesolimbic DA System of the Mouse," by Bethany Brookshire (Wake Forest University, 2010)."A New Deal For Mice," by C.C. Little (Scientific American, 1935).
Chapter 1: What inspired the creation of Ratatouille?
Not always. Do you happen to make a nice ratatouille? Yeah, I've made ratatouille before, but I don't have the skill, taste and feeling to make a great ratatouille. The thing is, it's just a bunch of vegetables, right? Well, yes, but no. Yes, but no, exactly. And that's the thing. Ratatouille as a theme and a title for the film, that was there from the beginning for a number of reasons.
First of all, it's about rats and ratatouille. It tells you it's a comedy because it's a silly word. And ratatouille as the quintessential peasant dish, it's just vegetables, it's stuff that you can find easily. If you know how to cook it well, it's beautiful. I'm speaking here with Jan Pinkover. I worked on a couple of the early feature films of Pixar, including A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc.
and Toy Story 2. And I got a break to develop my own feature film.
That feature film was Ratatouille. It's about a rat named Remy who lives in a farmhouse in the French countryside and dreams of becoming a chef.
Chapter 2: How did Remy the Rat become a beloved character?
You found cheese? And not just any cheese. Tom de chevre de paix! That would go beautifully with my mushroom!
But then Remy, his family, and his entire rat tribe are chased into exile, and he winds up in the sewers of Paris. As he explores the city above ground, Remy comes across the legendary Gusteau's restaurant. The late chef Auguste Gusteau was Remy's hero. His famous book is called Anyone Can Cook. But Remy sees that Gusteau's restaurant is now run by a corrupt, tyrannical chef named
And there's a new garbage boy in the kitchen named Linguini. Linguini does want to cook, but he doesn't have much talent. Remy has talent, but he's a rat. So the two of them become secret collaborators.
One look and I knew we had the same crazy idea.
Remy hides on top of Linguini's head under his chef's toque and becomes his puppet master chef. Together, they make beautiful food, potato leek soup, the perfect French omelet, and a twist on sweetbreads a la Gusteau. It turns out that Linguini is the son of the great Gusteau, and the secret collaboration between Linguini and Remy turns out to be a big hit. as was the film itself.
Ratatouille, released in 2007, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and it grossed over half a billion dollars. That made Ratatouille a big outlier in Hollywood. And Remy the Rat was an outlier, too. As we've been learning in this series on rats, it is a rare day when a rat is the hero of any story. Since the days of the bubonic plague, rats have been associated with death and disease,
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Chapter 3: Is it time to rethink our perception of rats?
To call someone a rat is a special kind of insult. It suggests they've behaved so badly as to be subhuman. But is it time to reassess the rat's reputation, perhaps even rehabilitate it? Today on Freakonomics Radio, we dissect Ratatouille with Jan Pinkova. In a way, Ratatouille is like ballet dancing with Nazis. We look at why rats have been so valuable to human science.
Like right all the way down to DNA.
And we hear a love story.
Not to say anything negative about the hamsters of the world, but I think it's a different relationship.
Come along for this third and final episode in our series, Sympathy for the Rat.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
We humans really love some animals. Two thirds of American households have at least one pet, most of them dogs or cats. We often treat them like members of the family. When we hear about an animal being mistreated or killed, the outcry can be as loud as if it happened to a fellow human, if not louder.
And yet, in 2022, when New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared war on rats and appointed a rat czar to get rid of them, there was almost no outcry. The rat seems to have crossed some invisible border from animal to pest, even menace. But it wasn't always thus.
The first rats that were domesticated, they were pets in Victorian England, and they were not thought of as negatively as we think about even pet rats today. So it was revered to have a rat on your shoulder.
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Chapter 4: What is Julia Zichello's personal experience with rats?
This is Julia Zichello. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and is an evolutionary biologist at Hunter College. But her rat experience is not just academic.
During the pandemic, I got a car for the first time because alternate side of the street parking was relaxed. I kept it in one place for too long. I also don't really drive that often. So yes, when I went to start it, it didn't start. And I had to get it towed. And the mechanic told me that there was bedding in there connected with rats and also orange peels. This was in the engine?
This was in the engine. It was the late fall, early winter, which is just the time that they would be looking for a warm place. I thought it was really funny at first before I got the bill from the mechanic. What did it look like inside the engine? The wires were gnawed.
You can see shards or pieces of the wire and then the orange peels and some dry leaves and other things that they were using for nesting material.
I know that rats are extraordinarily fertile. They have really short gestation. They have a lot of pups. Do you know if maybe your car was also a rat baby hospital as well?
I don't know, but it may have been, which is, you know, kind of cute.
Zichello had never thought deeply about rats until they moved into her car. And even then, her attitude was relaxed. She wasn't strongly anti-rat, nor did she find a reason to become pro-rat. But soon after the car incident, things changed.
Yeah. So I inherited rats from a family member who moved to a building that could no longer have pets. The rats were already, I believe, 18 months old. I felt the same way most people would feel, the like, oh, no way kind of thing. Like, oh, my gosh, their tails. Everyone's so upset about their tails because they're so gross. But, you know, then I warmed to them over time.
Eventually, because you're feeding it, because it's a little bit lovely, then you end up feeling some warmth towards it. What kind of rats were your pet rats? They were two different breeds. One was agouti, and that was sort of silver-colored. The other was a hooded rat, which was white with just a little bit of black on their head and striped down their back.
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Chapter 5: How are rats used in scientific research?
I mean, I couldn't do anything. I had no room to move them and I couldn't stop drinking coffee.
Did you take your grinder into the bathroom or a closet or something?
No, no. I just noted it and continued on with the grinding. You know, their sensory systems are so acute. Obviously, their olfaction, their sense of smell is really good. Their hearing is really good. And they seem very sensitive to things in their environment. It did also make me think about the rats in New York City.
There aren't a lot of studies about the behavior of wild rats from the perspective of the rats. One of the things I thought about after having the pet rats is that I wonder if the rats in New York City are very, very stressed. They like to be underground. When you see them skittering across the sidewalk, it stresses you out, but I'm pretty sure that they're also highly stressed.
Is it possible that one partial solution to the infestation of wild rats in a city like New York The widespread embrace of pet rats?
I don't know about the widespread embrace of pet rats, but I think the rat czar in New York, I think that she should have a pet rat. If you want to control them or if you want to love them, you have to know about them.
I first came across Julia Zichello when I read a piece she wrote for a hyperlocal news site called the West Side Rag. If you live on the Upper West Side and don't read the rag, well, I don't even know what to say. Here is the first line of Zichello's piece. Almost a year has passed and I can finally write about it.
So they both passed away, sadly. One of the things that happened towards the end of their life, which also is something that's relevant to all rats, is that they aged so quickly. And they started to show signs of aging, like being hunched over, losing body fat. One month in a rat's life is equal to three years in human years.
People know this because there's a lot of people, obviously, who use rats in the lab trying to study aging and trying to make that equivalent. So they aged very rapidly. We don't really exactly know why they died. They didn't show any signs of disease that we could see. But one of the things that happened that was very sad is that Sylvie died first. And then for Pele, he was alone.
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Chapter 6: Why are rats preferred in certain types of lab research?
So I wonder about how many people have technically been helped by that versus the number of people who have been harmed by diseases they may have acquired from a rat.
What was the common ancestor?
The common ancestor was an animal that lived in the late Cretaceous around the time of the dinosaurs. There's not a specific name, but we use genetics to understand how far back these common ancestors lived. The anatomy and behavior of that common ancestor was much more rat-like than it is human-like. They were likely nocturnal. Some of them may have been insectivores.
And their basic anatomy was much more rat-like than humans.
For all the parallels there may be between a rodent like a rat and humans, one gigantic difference is fertility and lifespan. Is that meaningful in any significant way to us?
Yeah, so that makes rats good model organisms because you can have many offspring within your human life as a scientist studying them. So you can see how things translate from one generation to the next. One rat female can have up to 72 pups per year. Wow. Wow.
Coming up after the break, what other virtues does the lab rat have?
If you want an animal to press a lever and receive a drug, a rat is generally the better choice.
And how did the rat become a lab animal in the first place? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. In one recent year, the market for laboratory rats in the U.S. was estimated at $1.5 billion. And that number is expected to rise as biomedical research keeps expanding.
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