Access Rat: How The World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way To The Top Authored By Jerry Langton Presented As Mobi

this was a big disappointment, I'm fascinated by rats, and tend to grab any new books about them that come out, I found this book to be sensationalistic and at times almost offensive, however,

Langton is a great lover of hyperbole, and while the exerpts from various government reports and academic articles that he quotes at the beginning of each chapter are documented, the other statistics and facts he mentions throughout the book are not.
They are also often stated in such a way as to sound frightening, but to be completely meaningless.
For example, he states that "according to astudy,topercent of pet rats andtopercent of the wild rats in any given population in North America carry the ratbite fever virus.
It's fatal inpercent of caes in humans, despite antibiotic treatment, " There are several huge problems with this statement,Langton never cites his source,Ratbite fever in North American is most commonly caused by Streptobacillus moniliformis, which is a bacterium, not a virus Langton should have caught this in particular, since viral infections can't be treated with antibiotics.
sitelinkAccording to the CDC, UNTREATED ratbite fever has a mortality rate of, which makes his reported mortality rate ofin treated cases unlikely.
And finally, the statistic "" is just completely meaningless and meant as a scare tactic, "It might be a small number of them, it might be ALL OF THEM! WE JUST DON'T KNOW!" The fact that one paragraph contains so many factual errors and exaggerations forces me to question the quality of research in the rest of the book, particularly since it is not in any way documented.


On a more personal note, I found Langton's characterization of pet rat owners to be mocking and onesided.
The book is strewn with quotes from a petition from petitiononline, com, titled "Don't Take Are Rats," protesting the proposed ban of pet rats in Saskatchewan, Due to the nature of online petitions, I don't doubt that many of the comments on the petition were poorly spelled or worded, but Langton seems to have purposefully chosen the most egregious examples of the lot.
The one ratowner he actually interviews in the book is a goth panhandler who goes by Raven and keeps rats in order to frighten the squeamish.
He writes, of rat owners, "The ones I met fell into two basic groups: the minority were like Raven, those who had rats to scare or freak out people usually their parents and those who had rats as an affected display of their kindness to society's leastloved creature.
. . Although they can all be included into one of two distinct groups, the common thread among rat owners I encountered was that they all considered themselves highly, if not extraordinarily, intelligent and wildly unappreciated.
"

As a rat owner myself, I'm offended by his condescending manner and his assumption that I am either eager to frighten the unwary, or I'm narcissistic and affected.
For the record, I keep rats because I find them to be far more affectionate and intelligent than other small caged animals, and keeping a cat or dog is impractical for me.
I also enjoy observing their particular behaviors, and yes, I find them cute! Langton believes that you are either a ratperson, or a nonratperson, and that will not change.
I've found this to be far from the case, While a minority of my friends are completely squicked by my rats, most of them have come to appreciate and enjoy them to a degree that's surprising even to themselves.
The world of people who enjoy rats as pets is full of eccentrics, but I doubt any more so than that of people who are enthusiastic about a particular breed of dog or about pet parrots.


So, verdict The book is poorly researched, or at least poorly documented, and while it may provide an interesting diversion, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is looking for anything other than scare stories.
If you're looking for good nonfiction about rats, I would instead recommend Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan.
This book is an easystars, It provides an earthly, realistic and unflinchingly honest look at rats as a species and their interaction with humans through our shared history.
If you read nothing else of factual weight this year, this book is positively full of organized, easy to understand facts and follows the rat from the prehistoric era through its impact on the global food supply.
And the ride doesn't stop there Jerry Langton includes an accurate and well sourced hypothesis on the future of the rat as a species.
A combination of collected views from the people who exterminate, eradicate, and have their property destroyed by rats rounds out this informative read.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the natural world or how human beings interact with other species, or just for a different perspective on that lurking, scampering basement terror whose habits and history so often goes unseen.
Rat is, unsurprisingly, very much cut from the same mold as Robert Sullivan's sitelinkRats, They differ in journalistic particulars, which I'll get to, but they're both from the themed collection of facts school of book writing,

and they emerge from the impulse to use facts to sell papers/books rather than to pose and answer questions.
Obviously as an academic I think that's a bad way to write a book in general, but with rats it's much more annoying.
Rats sell magazines and books as a boogeyman, which gives authors plenty of incentive to play up that narrative with anecdote and personal experience and also to maybe not work too hard to emphasize the degree of confidence and commonness that can be ascribed to certain wowing tidbits.


Langton is a bit more bold about the fact that this is journalism, not academia.
He cites dozens of scientific and historical facts about rats, often with only minimal caveats as to their reliability.
Yet not a single one of them has a citation! There is no way to chase down these claims and get more information on how they were determined or whether any of them are sheer hearsay and poppycock.
Langton claims, for instance, that rats can leapfeet up in the air without a running start.
I've seen young rats doft, but four seems like it would take a special kind of rathlete.
But maybe it's typical in wild rats who have to do that sort of thing to access garbage.
Hard to be sure, since I don't know where Langton got that information, That's something I don't let my undergrad students get away with on throwaway assignments and I don't understand why his editor let him get away with it or maybe they had him cut it, who knows.


Where Sullivan dismissed pet rats as a fundamentally different animal, not worthy of his consideration, Langton seems quixotically fascinated with the pet rat owner, an object of his gawking narration even more than the rats themselves.
He interleaves chapters with, among other documents, three letters sent to the Saskatchawan government to protest their proposed ban on pet rats.
Many of these are clearly written by children, full of pentup anger and shoddy grammar, and it feels exploitative and cruel.
It's hard to imagine the logic behind their inclusion, and it feels vaguely unethical There's a chapter that partly covers contemporary pet rat owners, and the tone is disgustingly psychoanalytic.
He paints us as weirdo loner goth outsiders, probably unattractive and shunned by their families, who identify with rats because they're outcasts.
Oof.

To give a sense of just how much of an outoftouch Boomer Langton comes off as: "It doesn't come as a huge surprise that he's into a style of music he calls "death metal" and used to play in some "pretty nasty" bands himself.
"

Part of that bitterness seems to come from an antagonism he established after publishing the articles that formed the seed for this book.
He got a lot of angry mail from pet rat owners and advocates who were doing some damage to the facts in order to make our little friends look good.
This is, unfortunately, entirely believable, and I can see it getting pretty annoying, He seems to have overcorrected a teensy bit, and he pretty uncritically frames rats as a historic and universal enemy of the human race, which is dumb.


All of that collectively got me pretty upset with Mr, Langton, and I was about ready to tweet angrily about how fuckin heated people would get if someone wrote a book like this about stray dogshow gross they were, how many people they'd killed one of Langton's clearest whoppers is that more people are bitten by rats than any other animalall the stats I could find didn't even mention them dogs are the clear leader, and cats in second, for obvious reasons, how hard they are to control, etc.
But then he did it! He claims to be responding to pet rat owners who liken rats to dogs, and points out that this is a bad comparison since dogs are so brutal.
That got my attention and won me over a bit,

After that I found some other redeeming features here, First, he does a lot of on the ground reporting, but unlike Sullivan, he never makes a big deal out of his own experiences.
It's so lowkey that his biggest pilgrimage the Karni Mata rat temple in India I'm not actually sure he made, which isn't great, but it's better than Sullivan's pretentious Thoreaulite fare.
Second, his weird hangups didn't stop him from interviewing over a hundred he claims pet rat owners and looking into the history of their domestication, which Sullivan just wrote off.
He never discusses the advantages of rats as pets, of course, but it's something,

Finally, despite the lack of sources, he generally puts anecdotal claims at arm's length, at least implying he's interested in vetting claims and that the other facts are from primary lit or experience by extension not that that's the only reason to cite sources, obv.
He also shows a ton more curiosity about rat evolution, ecology, and history than Sullivan did, which of course is the whole point of the endeavor from my end.
The benefits of that curiosity are a bit tempered by the fact that I can't dive into the bibliography and learn more, but it's appreciated.


It's just a shame that he completely lacks the historian's selfconsciousness of his own culture, of the assumptions he brings to this project.
He never questions why he or his readers might take the idea of keeping rats as pets to be taboo and weird.
He takes it for granted that rats are disgusting and any aberrations from that idea must be explained through desperation or pathology.
For instance, he discusses the filthy and diseaseladen conditions of Africans with Black rats living in their thatched roofs in lurid detail, like living near animal poop was some unique form of African poverty and suffering, and then reveals that these rats constitute a major food source for those households.
It's painted as a uniquely modern problem, a situation born of desperate poverty and the defaunation of landscapes by overhunting and habitat conversion.
The idea that not eating rats might be a more unique and Western phenomenon doesn't seem to have occurred to him.
Of course there is no discussion of the potentially complex and interactive nature of this relationship as rats became domestic animals in the first place.
.