A week ago Saturday, RatsPacNW sponsored its Seventh Annual Ratapalooza at the VFW Hall on Mercer Island. (Evidently the Convention Center and Benroya Hall were booked). Ratapalooza is, of course, a festival for rat aficionados featuring rats of all shapes and sizes. This year’s event included rats wearing tiny Halloween costumes, a rat named Snoodles wearing a reindeer outfit, and an appearance by Tanya Hardin’s (no relation) polydactyl rat Hannibal, a black Berkshire rat, which has seven toes (three more than usual) on its front feet and six toes (one more than usual) on its back feet.
For added entertainment, Ratapalooza offered a variation on the old carnival game known as a “Cakewalk.” At Ratapalooza, the game, which is called the “Crapwalk,” involves a bunch of rats on a field of numbered squares. Participants are assigned one of the numbers on the grid and if one of the rats…actually, I think I’ll leave the further details of the game to your imagination.
Suffice to say that if I were participating in the game and won, I’d have very little appetite for my cake prize. If you were busy last Saturday and missed the event, I think you can still see photographs of the highlights of Ratapalooza on the Seattle Times Web site.
As we all remember from high school, (and I’m speaking here of what we remember from our textbooks, not from the hallways or locker room) rats are members of the muridae family of the rodentia order. Rats originated in the Far East before making their way around the world. The most common varieties of rats are the black rat (rattus rattus) and the brown or Norway rat (rattus norvegicus).
In Western culture, more so than in Eastern cultures, rats have an unsavory reputation. This may be related to their association with the Black Plague that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages. Rat apologists would point out that rats were actually a victim of the plague rather than the cause of it in that the plague was spread by a micro-organism carried on the tropical rat flea, itself an unwanted pest afflicting otherwise innocent black rats.
The depiction of rats in the entertainment media has historically been negative and, to some degree, inaccurate. Rats in the arts tend to be portrayed as viscous, aggressive, untrustworthy and generally unsavory characters, often of low intelligence and with poor personal hygiene habits. They often wear funny hats and speak like hardened criminals or smooth con men.
There are, of course, positive rat role models to be found in the arts and literature. One example is Remy, the aspiring chef in Pixar’s film Ratatouille. One might be tempted to include Ratty from The Wind in the Willows as another positive rat role model. However, it turns out that, despite his name, Ratty was actually a European Water Vole, another unfortunate blow to ratkind.
I like to think that I am above average when it comes to tolerance. In fact, the only thing I really will not tolerate is intolerance. But when it comes to rats, I have to confess that I can find no place in my heart for the little vermin.
Mice I can take or leave. Hamsters I am indifferent to. Guinea pigs I accept on a live- and let-live basis despite the fact that, not too many years ago, a guinea pig owned by my daughter decided to crawl into my T-shirt drawer and die after wrapping himself in the warm embrace of my formerly favorite T-shirt – something I myself did not become aware of until one early morning when I slipped on the T-shirt in the dark and felt something oddly fuzzy and inert lying between me and my shirt.
Rats have always rubbed me the wrong way. The depth and intensity of my antipathy to them is such that, for a long time, I thought that perhaps I might have been bitten by a rat in my childhood, or else pulled one out of a tub of Colonel Sander’s fried chicken at a drive-in movie.
But my mom swears no one or no thing other than my brother ever bit me when I was a child, and I’ve never eaten fried chicken at a drive-in movie, so the origin of my obsessive dislike of rats must lie somewhere else.
Like a compulsive criminal returning to the scene of his crime, or a masochistic pilgrim returning to the site of a spiritual vision that has long since vanished, I’ll check in on the Ratapalooza next year. See you at the Crapwalk.
Islander Tom Tyner is an attorney for the Trust for Public Land. He is author of “Skeletons From Our Closet,” a collection of writings on the island’s latte scene.
