Complex Numbers

Rats!

Despite the significance of the Great Groundhog today, we're going to talk about another rodent. The Platonic ideal of rodent, the Ruler of Rodentia:

In Defense of the Rat  
They’re less of a pest than you think—actually, they have quite a few benefits.

Now, if someone had said that, say, mosquitos were "less of a pest than you think," I'd know they were bullshitting. But rats are cute, and don't we give cute critters the benefit of the doubt?

There was a time when we human beings used to put animals on trial for their alleged crimes against us.

Gosh, I wonder what would happen if they put us on trial for our alleged crimes against them?

The earliest of these prosecutions in the Western tradition of law appears to be a case against moles in the Valle d’Aosta, Italy, in 824 AD...

Another clear example of anti-rodent prejudice.

In the centuries between, a killer pig was dressed in human clothing and hanged in Falaise, France...

Okay, I can kind of see the pig wearing human clothing (just imagine Alex Jones), but how the hell do you hang a hog? They ain't got no neck.

...Marseille put dolphins on trial for crimes unknown...

That one's easy. The prince heir apparent of France was known as le dauphin. Someone mispronounced the definite article, and they thought they were trying les dauphins.

...and a rooster—in what must have been a case of mistaken identity—was burned at the stake in Basel, Switzerland, for the witchery of laying an egg while male.

Maybe he was just living his true life.

In 1522, “some rats of the diocese” of Autun, France, were charged with criminally eating and destroying barley crops. A skilled legal tactician, one Barthélemy de Chasseneuz, was assigned to defend the rats.

How come most of these are French?

Well. The article is fairly long, but I found it enlightening. Especially the part about how humans were a more proximate cause of The Plague than rats were: "In the case of the notorious plague in Europe, the event that forever marked rats as public enemy number one, the animals may be almost entirely innocent."

But there's also a long discussion about rats' intelligence and demonstrated capacity for empathy—not only with other rats, but with humans.

I'm not saying you should venture into the NYC subway tunnels and pick up a rat. There really are hazards with wild rats—just like there are with raccoons, and everyone thinks trash pandas are just the cutest things (mainly because they are). But I've known several rats in my life, albeit briefly (rodents don't tend to live very long lives), and, yeah... they're not all vermin.

Now, if I could only convince my cats to stop leaving them for me as gifts, that'd be great.