Sullivan’s characterisation might be as appealing as biting down on a sore tooth, but diagnostically speaking, it’s also quite as useless. Very soon, there will be, again, 100 rats. If a given environment can support a population of 100 rats, then even if you kill them all, rats will move in from elsewhere. “I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but similar, thriving or suffering in the very cities where we do the same,” writes author Robert Sullivan in his book-length cogitation on New York’s murine inhabitants. That’s because rats live everywhere that humans live, profiting from the waste and warmth of peopled places, the opportune secrecy of man-made between-spaces and beneath-zones. Once you know the signs, he says, you see them everywhere. He zeroes in on the greasy streaks low on the walls where rats have squeezed by. His eyes track automatically to the corners of rooms, scanning for symptoms of an infestation: clusters of droppings, patterned disturbances of dust or debris. For about a month after he returns to Sweden from a regular three-to-five-month fieldwork stint in Salvador, Brazil, the epidemiologist and disease ecologist Dr Hussein Khalil is compulsively vigilant. Rat-spotting, it appears, is a habit-forming discipline.
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