But if anyone has picked up this book to learn about fancy rats, then they should put this book down right away none of the rats mentioned herein are at all fancy. Sometimes pet rats are called fancy rats. Both pet rats and laboratory rats are Rattus norvegicus, but they are not wild and therefore, I would emphasize, not the subject of this book. One spring, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, I saw a red-haired brown rat that had been run over by a car. (The two species still survive alongside each other in some Southern coastal cities and on the West Coast, in places like Los Angeles, for example, where the black rat lives in attics and palm trees.) The black rat is always a very dark gray, almost black, and the brown rat is gray or brown, with a belly that can be light gray, yellow, or even a pure-seeming white. The brown rat is sometimes confused with the black rat, or Rattus rattus, which is smaller and once inhabited New York City and all of the cities of America but, since Rattus norvegicus pushed it out, is now relegated to a minor role. The average brown rat is large and stocky it grows to be approximately sixteen inches long from its nose to its tail-the size of a large adult human male's foot-and weighs about a pound, though brown rats have been measured by scientists and exterminators at twenty inches and up to two pounds. Rattus norvegicus is one of the approximately four hundred different kinds of rodents, and it is known by many names, each of which describes a trait or a perceived trait or sometimes a habitat: the earth rat, the roving rat, the barn rat, the field rat, the migratory rat, the house rat, the sewer rat, the water rat, the wharf rat, the alley rat, the gray rat, the brown rat, and the common rat.

I offer a portrait that is hysteria-free, that merely describes the rat as a rat.Ī rat is a rodent, the most common mammal in the world. So, with this in mind, I offer a brief introductory sketch of the particular species of rat that runs wild in New York- Rattus norvegicus, aka the Norway or brown rat. What B about rats? And so, as I arise from my selfishness to describe the wild rat of New York City, the object of this nature experiment, I begin by noting that when it comes to rats, men and women labor under a lot of misinformation-errors inspired, it seems to me, by their own fears, by their own mental rat profiles rather than any earth-based facts. BUT ENOUGH ABOUT YOU, I think I hear the reader protesting.

Rats by robert sullivan