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1894: Rat in the Drum

58:24 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Rats became pests and lab models only because humans defined ownership, disease and standardized breeding around them.

  1. A pest is made by ownershipThe grain store is insurance for people and a mountain of food for the rat; the boundary between them is human.
  2. Poison alone never clears a cityRat catcher Bobby Corrigan's answer is closed waste, sealed cellars and repaired buildings, because a poisoned rat just makes room for the next.
  3. The lab rat is a manufactured productKnown age, feed and lineage turned the albino rat into a comparable measurement, from Krampe's records to King's 38 generations.
Executive Summary AI
  • In episode 566 of Geschichten aus der Geschichte, Richard opens in 1894 at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where physiologist C.C. Stewart put a wild rat in a rotating drum to measure how alcohol, food and air pressure changed how far it ran, then swapped it for an albino rat.5:07
  • He argues a rat only becomes a pest once people claim ownership, quoting science journalist Bethany Brookshire and Austrian literature scholar Karin Wozonek, who cites an estimate that rats pollute ten times more food than they eat, while the Karni Mata temple in Rajasthan shows thousands of rats fed and protected instead.7:29
  • In 19th-century New York horse manure and uncollected waste fed the brown wandering rat, Rattus norvegicus, until the city began around 1900 to collect garbage and remove dead horses, pushing the rats into sewers, cellars and walls.14:22
  • Also in 1894 plague broke out in Hong Kong, where Alexandre Yersin isolated the pathogen later named Yersinia pestis; Masanori Ogata in 1897 and Paul-Louis Simond in 1898 showed fleas carry it between rats, and authorities in Bombay and San Francisco began trapping, dissecting and mapping rats, blaming Chinatown after a dead man was found there on 6 March 1900.20:41
  • Back at the drum, the laboratory rat was standardized through Hugo Krampe's documented pairings, Henry Herbert Donaldson at the Wistar Institute from 1906 and Helen Dean King's inbred lines that stood at the 38th generation by 1920, producing what sociologist Michael Lynch calls the analytic rat alongside the naturalistic one.31:50
Key Quote
“Pests are a problem as old as ownership.”
— Richard8:20
Key Quote
“If that is not done, then it is also useless to poison a rat, because it then simply makes room for the next rat.”
— Richard18:07
Key Quote
“Plague fake is part of plot to plunder.”
— Richard29:23