Friday, June 03, 2005
Wrong About Rodents
Everyone has a good rodent story. Or a bad one, depending on your perspective. Maybe you’ve had a muscled gangster of a city rat stare you down at an alley’s edge. Or maybe it was a suspiciously fat gerbil given as an unwanted birthday present, which produced a half dozen babies before the party was over. Or maybe you’ve pulled a bag of potatoes out of storage only to find them chewed to graying nubs, with piles of mouse droppings left like calling cards. Those recent news reports about hamsters carrying viruses that likely killed a half-dozen transplant patients have done little to rosy up the image of rodents. There may be a good reason that we say “Rats!” when things go awry.
“Rats” was the word on my lips when my grade-school daughters petitioned for rodents for their recent birthdays. “Oh, please please please?” the youngest begged. “How will I ever learn responsibility without caring for a small animal?” I immediately moved our child-rearing books to a higher shelf, and tried not to shudder. Who brings vermin into the house on purpose? I had spent years shriekingly running the critters back outdoors in lurching Have-a-Heart traps.
But I tapped my inner Better Self, and intoned a mantra: Open Mind, Open Heart. What happens when we do the work to reframe our assumptions? Is a dandelion a weed, or a flower? How does an enemy become a friend? What makes a rat a pest, or a pet? Just like the amiably open-minded saleswoman in Michael Moore’s film, Roger and Me, whose roadside stand proclaimed “Bunnies or Rabbits: Pets or Meat,” we are no doubt richer for learning to see the world from multiple perspectives.
After all, as adults, we can usually avoid what repulses us, keeping our likes and dislikes in tidy columns, rarely recouping the bad. Children have less power, and so they’re used to being told to eat things they find “disgusting,” to do homework they find “stupid,” and to sit through long, boring events they had no hand in planning. And you know what? They deal. And in the process they often discover that the broccoli isn’t so bad, really, with some cheese on it, or that the endless band concert they sat through actually had some rockin’ drum solos.
I’m not sure I’ve reached that enlightened point, quite, with our new rodents. When we made our pet store pilgrimage, it was hard not to feel like the world’s biggest suckers, as we filled our cart with 40 dollar cages and specially balanced rat and mouse food and even chew toys, for heaven’s sake. Standing before the rodent display tanks, as before banks of TVs in the Sears appliance department (only here, every channel was the rodent channel), I briefly petitioned for some fluffy, fat-cheeked hamsters. Not a chance. Hamsters were the ho-hum equivalent of getting your ears pierced, when my girls wanted nose rings. They wanted the ick factor and thrill of transgression. I finally got it. So, they chose a so-called “fancy” mouse and “fancy” rat – “fancy” being a term for a four-dollar mouse or a seven-dollar rat. I noticed a bemused Amish family eyeballing our overloaded cart and the two cardboard boxes of skittering critters, and I had the distinct feeling that we were becoming someone else’s good rodent story.
Of course, mice and rats have been domesticated and revered for their cleverness for thousands of years, surviving the black mark of the Plague to become popular pets with Victorians and a growing and passionate contemporary fan club. No doubt what we find both appealing and appalling about mice and rats is their uncomfortable similarity to ourselves – we, who also respond to voice commands and perform tedious tricks for rewards. Next to rodents, our tidy columns of self and other, good and bad, don’t quite hold up. Rereading childhood classics with my daughters like Stuart Little, or the anti-establishment Flower Power stories of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, or Flowers for Algernon, I’m reminded how often sympathetic rodents are cast against the villain of human hubris.
Those childcare manuals say plenty about instilling adult values in children, but not enough about how children’s values can improve adults. Maybe, though, caring for these critters isn’t so much making my daughters better people as it is making them better animals. When I cup our sleek mouse in my palm, or stroke the brown and white patches on our rat’s astonishingly warm chest, this surprising truth is as plain as the whiskers on their faces, and as piercing as their unwavering gaze.