ABSTRACT
This chapter describes developments that today allow rats to be depicted also as ‘clean, intelligent, affectionate’ and ‘extremely rewarding pets that will repay any attention and affection one gives them a thousand fold’. Although the rat has been transformed through breeding to fit the requirements for human use, as a laboratory animal and a pet, the new fascination for the rat still feeds upon the same images that made it feared and hate. The transformation of the sociogenic identity of the rat seems to have begun in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century. At this time London held some forty ratpits, where enthusiasts could enjoy the ‘ratting sport’, ratbaiting. The rat is connected to rubbish by means of contagion, by its connection to the sewers, but it is still possible to consider the rat as separate from the sewer. The rat of the new millennium is no less at the crossroads of cultural expectations.
