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Rats (at least the kinds commonly kept as pets) are for the most part intelligent, clean, quiet, sociable, and even affectionate. Still, there are many people who are absolutely repulsed at the sight of any rat and will run screaming even from the tamest Rattus norvegicus. This reaction is due in large part to our culture's association of rats with filth, poverty, disease, and death. Rats are the furtive invaders who hide in the dark, dank spaces of our buildings and towns, emerging en masse after dark to feed on garbage and food scraps. They can carry disease, either directly or via the insects that feed on them (such as the fleas whose bite spread the bubonic plague). Although in the wild they're shy and prefer to avoid contact with humans, they have long, narrow teeth housed in strong jaws that can deliver powerful defensive bites when necessary. Rats tend to live where humans live, since the presence of man generally creates an abundance of food and shelter. Because rats live for the most part out of the sight of people and usually emerge from their dwelling places when we're either asleep or not around to see them, it's easy to imagine that far more of them are lurking in those impenetrable dark spaces than really are there. We create maxims that are far more reflections of our anxieties and fears about feeling surrounded by unseen crawly things than they are accurate estimators of populations — sayings such as You're never more than six feet away from a rat and For every cockroach you see, there are ten more you don't see. Another statistic in this vein is the one rat per person rule — the claim that in any sufficiently large urban area, the rat population is as large as the human population: This statistic reflects the frightening belief that no matter how much we may try to trap, poison, or otherwise chase away those fearsome rodents, we cannot vanquish them; they will always be able to field an army of insurgents equal in number to our own. But, according to Robert Sullivan, the author of Rats, this statistic is based upon a nearly century-old misunderstanding and greatly exaggerates the true number of rats to be found in a typical city. The one rat per person claim stems from a study of rats conducted in England by W.R. Boelter and published in 1909 under the title The Rat Problem. Boelter surveyed the English countryside (but not villages, towns, or cities) and came up with an educated guess, estimating that England had one rat per acre of cultivated land. Since England had 40 million acres of cultivated land at the time, Boelter pegged the country's rat population at 40 million. And since England also had a human population of 40 million at the time, there was some basis for claiming that the country was host to one rat per person. But Boelter's estimate may have been way off the mark, and even if it was accurate, the putative 1:1 ratio between people and rats derived from it was merely coincidental, an artifact of England's just happening to have a human population equal to its number of cultivated acres. One rat per person was a figure unique to the time and place in which Boelter conducted his study, not a generalized figure that could be applied everywhere. Nonetheless, as Sullivan noted, People loved that statistic, maybe because they abhorred it, and the figure is still frequently cited in news articles dealing with rat control efforts in large metropolitan areas, particularly New York City: Even figures several orders of magnitude higher than one per person are sometimes quoted in reference to New York's rat population: Just how many rats are to be found in a large city like New York? Far fewer than one might think:
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