The Pest We All Live With: Cultural Meaning and the Life and Death of Rats

This dissertation examines the cultural meaning of some of our least-loved nonhuman companions: rats. Scholarship in sociology and other humanities and social sciences disciplines has increasingly sought to treat nonhuman animals as important participants in social processes, rather than superficial window dressing on the periphery of the human social world. I extend this work by examining a specifically antagonistic relationship between humans and animals, namely rat extermination. This topic, I argue, has important lessons to impart regarding social relationships with the nonhuman world and nature, despite being overlooked due to rats’ generally negative associations and the unpleasantness of the killing involved in extermination.My study is primarily based on a multi-sited ethnography featuring participant observation and semi-structured interviews in three locations: the Canadian province of Alberta, Downtown Los Angeles, California, and Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands. These three sites represent a typology of landscapes (rural, urban, and island) where the practice of rat control proceeds in varying ways and for varying motivations. In rural places like Alberta, rat control is a measure taken to guard against economic losses by preventing rats from contaminating agricultural yields and draining the resources of farmers. In urban areas, rats prevent a public health risk as vectors for infectious diseases. Finally, on islands, rats are targeted for eradication for environmental conservation purposes by organizations hoping to protect native species and their habitats.\nBeyond these general differences related to their landscapes, each of my specific cases has a particular relationship between the rat control and the social and cultural context within which it occurs. In Alberta, a government program inspects farms near the border with neighboring Saskatchewan to guard its decades-long claim to province-wide “rat-free” status. This program, I find, clarifies Alberta’s geographic borders and the boundaries of its collective cultural identity by resonating with broader cultural currents of nativism and opposition to outside influence. Los Angeles’s Civic Center, meanwhile, had a widely reported rat infestation in 2019, prompting a multi-pronged government response. I find that LA’s rat issues are inseparable in the public imagination from the city’s homeless crisis, which was specifically cited as a cause of the infestation. The attempts to simultaneously address both these issues attempt to secure public faith in the notion of a clean separation between “inside” and “outside.” Finally, rats are one of many invasive species targeted by a group of NGOs in the Galápagos Islands, in programs aimed at preventing the extinction of native species. These programs raise deep ethical questions around what interventions are morally justified for the goals of environmental stewardship.\nWith these three separate empirical investigations, I advance two overarching arguments: First, rat control is a social practice that draws and clarifies the boundaries of nature and society, and second, rat control enforces an implicit hierarchy of living things that mirrors and is entangled with social inequalities. Together, these findings demand that we extend the lessons of environmental justice, the notion that the burden of environmental problems fall disproportionately on already marginalized populations, to the cultural imaginations of nature and environmentalism itself.\n

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