Editor’s Note: This is the third post in the Dwelling in Place series edited by Nicole Miller. You can read other posts in this series here. Selected posts from this series, including this one, will also be cross-published on Germinate: An Environmental History Review.
Dwelling is always a multispecies practice although scholars often overlook it. From urban wildlife such as coyotes to domestic pets and pests, human dwellings always play host to nonhuman organisms. This fact makes the history of dwelling an important topic not only for architectural or urban history, but also for environmental history.
Among the most famous academic pieces about dwelling is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1951 lecture (later essay) “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” The piece is hyper-focused on human dwelling practices and ignores nonhuman animals almost completely. Heidegger mentions animals only once and defines them as part of the earth. He “environs” nonhuman organisms, pushing them back or down into the environment, making them not characters but setting in the human drama.1 Heidegger demonstrates the European tendency to objectify and instrumentalize animals dating back to Descartes. More recently, feminist theorist Donna Haraway carefully dismantled this tendency and offered an alternative view, seeing animals as “companion species,” fellow organisms that live with us, which transforms our sense of kinship and environmental care. Haraway’s notion is a major advance over Heidegger’s sidelining of animals, but it raises further questions about the various ways that nonhumans live with humans.
Enter rats. For millennia, rats have lived with humans, which demonstrates that not all our cohabitant species are chosen, as domestic pets and work animals are. Alongside dogs and horses, rats are among the oldest species that have co-evolved with us by dwelling together. It has been noted that “rats can chronicle human history.” By saving human artifacts, rats act as archivists. Archaeologists use rat remains and nests to document human dwelling practices from pre-Columbian Native Americans in Chaco Canyon to eighteenth-century Quaker settlers in Pennsylvania.
Brown rats (rattus norvegicus) and black rats (rattus rattus) are “inquiline” or tenant species to humans, making their habitat in the margins of our habitat: alleys, attics, basements, dumpsters, and sewers. Rats hide or lurk in the interstices of the human world. Common names for rat species indicate this inquiline relationship. In English, brown rats are known as “street,” “sewer,” or “wharf” rats, while black rats are “house,” “roof,” or “ship” rats. At best, our rat tenants play a “commensal” or mutually beneficial role, for example by eating our waste. At worst, they are parasitic, stealing food, damaging buildings and furnishings, and bringing us diseases like typhus and plague.
Thus, dwelling with rats has not always been friendly or peaceful. Humans have seen rats as pests to be controlled and killed for millennia. Archaeologists have documented an ancient Egyptian rat trap. In the Old Testament, rats stand as both symbols and literal carriers of filth, disease, and impurity. The tools and practices of catching and killing rodents have therefore been familiar parts of housekeeping for centuries: baits, poisons, traps, and predators like cats, dogs, snakes, and weasels.
This long history of dwelling with rats began to shift around 1900 when humans started rat proofing buildings, armoring the places they live, and working to exclude or repel rats. Although it is hard to date rat proofing precisely, this Google Ngram shows that rat proofing trickled into our lexicon between the 1830s and 1900, before seeing a major spike in use during the first half of the twentieth century. If pest control is timeless, rat proofing is not; it resides comfortably in the roughly two centuries since the 1830s, and especially during the third pandemic of bubonic plague, from 1894 to the 1950s.
I argue here that this change from dwelling with to dwelling without rats was a major turning point in the history of multispecies dwelling. Compared to the longstanding effort to catch and kill rats, rat proofing was more systematic, more rational, and more peaceful. It marked a significant shift in focus from rat bodies to rat behaviors, diets, and habitats. It overlapped with the birth of ecology as an established science and reflected a more ecological approach to managing rats by modifying the shared habitats in which humans and rats dwell, by making human habitats less viable for rats.
Dr. Rupert Blue, US Surgeon General from 1912 to 1920, wrote:
Ratproofing may be defined as a method of insulating structures against the ingress and egress of rodents. It is necessary because of the general use of wood as building material in this country, as well as because of certain forms of construction, both of which lend themselves to the harboring of rats. If concrete could be substituted for wood on ground areas, and if hollow walls could be sealed from below, the rodent menace would be brought under control. At all events, building ordinances should be based upon a knowledge of the habits of our common rodent species. A retaining wall of concrete extending entirely around a building, eighteen inches below and twelve inches above the ground, will protect it against the burrowing rat, and wire screens of the proper mesh, placed over ventilators and low windows, will exclude the climbing species.
Rat proofing had several wellsprings. One was the third pandemic of bubonic plague, alongside the Pasteur Institute scientist Paul-Louis Simond’s 1898 discovery that rats and their fleas were major vectors of human plague. Another was research by agronomists, economists, and biologists which attempted to calculate the huge cost, in food, disease, materials, and money, of living with rats.2 Finally, there were modernizing changes in architecture and building, for example the increasing use of concrete and steel, which became key materials in rat-proof construction.
Rat proofing often meant transforming existing buildings. The photograph above from New Orleans in the 1910s shows men working to seal gaps around a building’s foundation with a thick layer of concrete to prevent rats from burrowing underneath. Another tactic was removing double ceilings or double walls where rats could hide. In Asia, large hollow shafts of bamboo were scrutinized and removed. In the United States, builders replaced wooden plank sidewalks, common in the nineteenth century, with concrete. Openings like windows, vents, and pipes were covered with galvanized steel grates or screens that let air, water, and light flow, but kept rats out. Other spaces ripe for rat proofing were associated with animals and food: food storage areas, chicken coops, and horse stables. Farm advice literature was saturated with suggestions about rat proofing around this time. An 1890 Pennsylvania state agricultural report advised farmers about keeping a chicken coop, “Make it weather proof, man proof, rat proof, dog proof, and every other kind of proof.”3
Because rats will eat horse food, horse flesh, and horse manure, rat proofing dovetailed with the process of motorization, which gradually replaced large urban fleets of draft horses with motorized vehicles.4 Rat proofing, motorization, and new regulations on urban animals proceeded in parallel as large swaths of the urban food web were dismantled in a wave of modernization around the second industrial revolution. The choice to dwell with fewer horses increased the hope of living with fewer rats.
Rat proofing also entailed the transformation of many artifacts. Trashcans were made of metal with tight-fitting lids, as depicted in the 1914 cartoon above from New Orleans. Doors were fitted with metal kick plates and spring-loaded or hydraulic automatic closers. Sewer design changed in various ways. Manholes got smaller vents to prevent rats from climbing up and out of sewers. Sewer catch basins were positioned lower, so that rats could not jump from them to street level, while pipes and tunnels were fitted with smooth materials such as glazed tile that were more difficult for rat feet to grip.5
Ein Dahmer, CC BY-SA 3.0
The shipping chain, from ships to docks and warehouses also changed. Ships were more regularly fumigated, gangplanks were raised overnight to stop rats from boarding, and the ropes holding ships at dock were fitted with “baffles,” “bafflers,” or “rat guards,” disk-shaped barriers that stop rats from coming aboard. Because brown rats will swim, but not long distances, ships docked further from the shore to stop rats from swimming aboard. In sum, rat proofing meant a host of changes in infrastructure and practice. It changed the way we construct buildings and sewers, and the way we dispose of waste, store food, and manage shipping.
Having lived with rats, albeit uneasily, for centuries, rat proofing marks a major turning point in environmental history, the moment when some people decided to try to live without rats for a change. Today, this moment may already be coming to an end. Since the mid-twentieth century, when uses of rat proofing decline in the Ngram above, experts have become less confident about the feasibility of living without rats. This is partly motivated by the risks to people and wildlife from poisons and traps, but also by the increasing sense that working against our evolutionary history is a losing battle. Rats are probably too adaptable, clever, hungry, and prolific to ever be reliably excluded from the human world. Anthropologist Christopher Kelty has recently called for “living with” rats, and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo convened a 2023 commission to investigate how Parisians can “cohabitate” with rats. Perhaps it is time to accept rats as companion species who evolved to be our tenants, for better or for worse.
Notes
1 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 149.
2 David Lantz, The Brown Rat in the United States (1909).
3 Pennsylvania State Board of Agriculture, Report (Harrisburg, PA, 1890), p. 344, Google Books, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report/PiB5FzuogiMC
4 Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopokins University Press, 2007), p. 121.
5 Walter Wyman, The Rat and its Relation to Public Health (1910), p. 178.
Peter Soppelsa
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- Dwelling With and Without Rats - October 29, 2026