Music:

Camiidae webpage: https://camiidae.carrd.co/

-Weevil: Music for bugs – Camiidae:
https://youtu.be/PuVkc6xwtE0?si=CVqkFOk5pRtEXqP3

-Feels – Patrick Patrikios:
https://youtu.be/xaFdmWZ8a60?si=_e_Xn4vGWzxkueZS

-Danse Macabre – Kevin MacLeod (license 4.0 de Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/):
http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?collection=005

-Hey there – Half cool:
https://youtu.be/1g4pj5zostU?si=ZU8pUh0mZPMU7bt-

-Le Festin (From "Ratatouille") – Camille, Michael Giacchino
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3lSONLLx70

-Moth: Music for bugs – Camiidae:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmtW8GGVWAw

-Science Montage – Jeremy blake:
https://youtu.be/IhwFmOE2B7s?si=lcwA9MYeF0yLvI2w

-Losing your marbels – The Soundlings:
https://youtu.be/phfCOVz-tXo?si=sySI5alBbqkJHdZV

Sound effects:

- Shoot (From distance).mp3 by ZvinbergsA -- https://freesound.org/s/273303/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

https://freesound.org/people/ZvinbergsA/sounds/273303/

- Environment War 1 by mensageirocs -- https://freesound.org/s/232641/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0

https://freesound.org/people/mensageirocs/sounds/232641/

References:

Dean, Katharine R., Fabienne Krauer, Lars Walløe, Ole Christian Lingjærde, Barbara Bramanti, Nils Chr. Stenseth, and Boris V. Schmid. 2018. “Human Ectoparasites and the Spread of Plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (6): 1304–9. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1715640115.

Dunn, Peter K. n.d. 1.1 How Do We Know What We Know? | Scientific Research Methods. Accessed February 23, 2024. https://bookdown.org/pkaldunn/Book/.

Lee, Jia Hui. 2021. “Rat Tech: Transforming Rodents into Technology in Tanzania.” Arcadia, February. https://arcadia.ub.uni-muenchen.de/arcadia/article/view/302.

“Monument to the Laboratory Mouse.” 2023. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monument_to_the_laboratory_mouse&oldid=1187658714.

“Rats Can ‘Imagine’ Places They’ve Previously Visited.” n.d. Accessed February 23, 2024. https://www.science.org/content/article/rats-can-imagine-places-they-ve-previously-visited.

“Rodentia.” n.d. Accessed February 23, 2024. https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/rodentia/rodentia.html.

Steiner, Adam P., and A. David Redish. 2014. “Behavioral and Neurophysiological Correlates of Regret in Rat Decision-Making on a Neuroeconomic Task.” Nature Neuroscience 17 (7): 995–1002. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3740.

“The Rat Princess | Stories from Around the World | Frank Rinder | Lit2Go ETC.” n.d. Accessed February 23, 2024. https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/134/stories-from-around-the-world/5100/the-rat-princess/.

Venniro, Marco, and Sam A. Golden. 2020. “Taking Action: Empathy and Social Interaction in Rats.” Neuropsychopharmacology 45 (7): 1081–82. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-019-0596-0.

Script

Today story start with a visit to a Museum in Brussels, a military museum.

Between galleries full of all kind of warfare objects and machinery, from old armors to slick aircrafts. There was something else that called the attention of Dr. Jia Hui Lee; that day there were featuring a project about… rats. Rats used to defuse explosives.

Interview 1

For Jia, that was the beginning of a long journey that took him from Brusels, to Morogoro, Tanzania. To research about a very particular project in animal-human interaction.

-musical intro

Greetings my friend and welcome to “it’s not a monster” on defense of the misunderstood, the despised, the vilified or just… the ugly ones. I am David Andres Quinche. Today we are going to talk about rats, a tough case in rejection, I will say that is one of the 4 horsemen of the despicable animals.

And its justified, no? Their association with the dirtiness is so strong than back in XVII century even scientist as Jan Baptiste van Helmont used to believe that these kinds of critters emerged spontaneously from the spoiled wheat. They also seem aggressive, they bite, I mean, they even caused the black death in the medieval Europe!... right? Mmm not exactly. We are going to revisit each of these points, But I am not going to do it alone.

Interview 2

Jia Hui has work in these inter-species interactions in a lot of contexts, but today we are going to talk mostly about his experience with a project of an NGO called APOPO, which consist in training giant pouched rats Tanzania for a very special task.

But wait, before we talk about that… there is a basic question that we need to answer, what is a rat?

Interview 3

 The essay is called “Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation” if you want to check it out.

Interview 3

Rata, sugi, mouse, are categories that have different meanings. For example, for the case of Tanzania, which is the country that is going to centralize most of today’s narration:

Interview 4

As you can see there is no… an exact equivalent between what people may understand as a rat, and a specific taxonomic category, so I am going to use the broadest categorization possible, which kind of fit the definition of Panya: the order Rodentia.

With more than 1500 species. This is the second largest group of mammals. You can recognize them by their single pair of incisors in each jaw, different than the rabbits which have two pairs. They live in all continents except Antarctica, and they are very diverse, from the tiny kangaroo rats with reflex faster than blink, to the giant pig-size capybara, grazing in the big plains of south América, including flying squirrels able to glide between the threes, and highly complex societies of naked mole rats.

One of the things that makes them so special is their smell sense.

Interview 5

In this movie we follow the story of Remi, a young French rat passionate about cooking. He gradually starts experimenting with different types of food and ingredient…

Interview 6

And after some time, thanks to his skills and very well-trained smell and taste senses, he becomes a top-notch chef.

Interview 7

They can use this information to follow the trail of a very good food source… or even for the complete opposite.

Interview 8

Interview 9

This smelling superpower allows them to detect… even things that you wouldn’t expect.

*War noises*… war always left scars, in the souls, in the bodies, and in the land itself. Even after the guns get silenced, and the war machines leave, beneath the earth frequently remains landmines and other unexploded artefacts that are way more difficult to remove. And the thing is that this doesn’t occur distant isolated spaces, but very close to human settlements, places that once were daily used by the local communities remains inaccessible even after the war.

Traditionally, metal detectors are used to clean these areas but, in an old battlefield, distinguish between a bomb and simple scrap might be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Unless you can detect the explosive chemicals themselves. And before you get any worry no, the rat does not blow up, they are too light to activate the explosives, instead they are trained to detect the smell of TNT and tell their human counterparts when they found something, like those airport dogs, but way cheaper and easier to train. And here is where we come back to talk about the APOPO project. And the experience of Jia Hui following it.

Interview 9

However, people are not so willing to see rodents in the same way than dogs.

Interview 10

One of the main worries of the locals was about rodents chewing on their belongings… or biting their children. And here is where I have to ask to Jia Hui… do they bitte?

Interview 11

As I told you before, great part of the Identity of rodents is related with their teeth, and I would say that it’s their second superpower.

Interview 12

Their incisors have a thick enamel layer, but just in the frontal part, this makes that each time they grind their teeth against each other, they remain sharp, as an excellent chisel able to carve trough anything. They also grow during all their live, and that is way they need to gnaw and chew on stuff constantly to keep them from growing too much.

But then why they do it on people? You may say.

Interview 13

But sometimes, even if you are not smelling like food…

Interview 14

Rodents, can also have a bad day, and can you judge them? You would also bite an annoying human in a moody day.

But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean that they are going to eat you because they are angry and you smell like cheese. As Jia Hui told me, even if you are very unlucky and they bite you, with your reaction they are just going to freak out and run away. But for most of the people, which do not work with them, is very unlikely engage with rodents in a context that they are prone to bite.

But let’s said that they decided to visit you at home. First, do not put your Dorito smelling fingers close to them, and second, DO NOT corner them.

Interview 15

Instead of that or… even try the pointless attempt to kill them, try to create a corridor that leads to the exit, they are smart, they are not going to fight you when they can escape.

So, the final lesson sounds like the moral of a fable for kids, if you don’t want that a rat bite you, do not be mean with them… and wash your hands.

But, even besides this, there is other reasons of why Tanzanians don`t like Panya that much. In the second part of this episode, we are going to explore other challenges in this complicate relationship between rats and humans. How rats are innocent from some false accusations that we have put on them, and how their intellect makes them… surprisingly more similar to us that we might expect.

You can find references and extra material at the description. This episode was produced by me, David Quinche Giraldo, and with the collaboration of our interviewee, Dr. Jia Hui Lee.

Thanks for listening! And see you next time.