THE sky was darkening as rain clouds gathered to the west. It had been a long, hot summer and Carnaby Street exuded a fetid smell of stale lager and fast food. Groups of Italian and Spanish tourists dressed in transparent plastic rain coats moved swiftly past the mock Tudor pub and the cavernous neon shops stocked with leather bags, jeans, sun glasses and Bob Marley T shirts.
I was on my way to Oxford Street tube station when a punk with a Mohican approached me, braces slung low around the back of his tartan trousers. His head was shaved except for a vertical strip of red hair. "A've you got a cigarette, mate?" he asked. I shook my head, then noticed a specimen brown rat, weighing in at 300gm and capable of eating its own body weight in 10 days, emerging from under the collar of the punk's sweat shirt.
The Raltus norvegicus, also known as the Norway, common, brown, wharf or sewer rat, had a tail as long as the oily laces in the punk's Doe Marten's boots. A piece of rope tied around its neck serving as a leash was the rat's only concession to domesticity. As the rat clambered onto the punk's left shoulder, he took the creature between his thumb and forefinger and started tickling its head playfully.
Then, spotting a man lighting a cigarette under the awnings of a shop the punk replaced the pet rat on his shoulder, brushed past me and ambled off down the street. Pedestrians eyed the pair warily, regarding the rat with a curiosity which turned to mild revulsion.
Fear and loathing
Humans tend to view the rat's intelligence and instinctive ability to survive among us, combined with its tendency to spread disease, destroy crops and damage property, with a mixture of grudging admiration, apprehension, fear or loathing. Despite centuries of human ingenuity, efforts at controlling the rat population in our towns and cities have merely kept the creatures at bay.
In Britain today, experts believe that there is at least one rat per head of population with a recent survey indicating that there is likely to be a rat within 20 yards of every person there at any given time. The geographic distribution of the Irish rat is undoubtedly similar to that of their UK counterparts.
The brown rat is a natural survivor and a prolific breeder. Although its natural life expectancy is one year, a healthy female can produce seven litters, of between six and 22 young every year.
In Ireland, as in Britain, the rat is unwelcome. Around 7,000 complaints a year relating to rat infestation are received by the Eastern Health Board. As a result, 10,000 premises in Dublin, Wicklow and Kildare are treated for rat infestation annually and it is estimated that 50,000-100,000 rats are killed every 12 months in these three counties alone. The only good rat, as far as most people are concerned, is a dead rat.
The rat's tendency to carry disease is recorded in particularly frightening historical accounts of the Black Death, which came from Asia and ravaged Europe between 1348 and 1351. The rat, which harboured fleas, carried the plague to man with devastating consequences.
From flea to rat
After the flea infected the rat, it would leap up to 150 times the length of its body, transferring itself and its deadly bacilli from rat to man. The result was cataclysmic and according to some historical accounts up to a third of the population of Europe was wiped out as a result of a series of plague epidemics in the 14th century.
The Black Death first reached Europe from the caravan routes of Asia and China through the Crimea in 1346, and on October 1347, a fleet of 12 Italian galley ships from Genoa carried the plague to the Sicilian port of Messina. On June 13th 1348 the deadly visitation reached the British Isles, when a fleet of ships from Gascony docked at Weymouth in Dorset. Between 1348 and 1351 it carried off at least one eighth of the population of England. During the course of the 14th and 15th century, a total of 1.2 million people a third of the population of Britain - was wiped out by outbreaks of the bubonic and pneumonic plague.
No escape for Irish
Ireland did not escape the ravages of the plague. The first visitation of the bubonic and pneumonic plague epidemics of the 14th century started at Howth and Drogheda in 1348. The disease spread rapidly to Kilkenny, Limerick, Nenagh, Waterford and parts of Ulster and Connacht. "In Dublin alone between the beginning of August and Christmas 14,000 died", Friar John Clyn, of the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor in Kilkenny, recorded in the Annals of Ireland during the course of 1348.
Friar Clyn left a graphic record of the effects of the dreadful pestilence in Ireland. "Many died from boils and abscesses and from swellings. Rarely did only one die in a house for, usually, husband, wife, children and servants went the one way, the way of death," he wrote before succumbing to the plague in 1349.
This century the plague has killed several million people in India. Although the plague can now be treated with antibiotics, rats still pose a threat to man because of the 20 or more other diseases they carry, including Lassa fever, typhus, leprosy, salmonella, foot and mouth and Weil's disease.
As the so called poison resistant "Super Rat" looks set to flourish for another millennium the time may have come to reemploy the use of ancient curses to reduce our rat population. It was once a common belief in Ireland that rats in pasturages could be anathematised to death in rhyming verses or through metrical charms.
The tradition was recorded by the Jacobean lyrical poet and playwright Ben Jonson. "Rhyme them to death, as they do Irish rats," he wrote, while Sir Philip Sidney also noted this phenomenon in Defence of Poesie. "I will not wish unto you ... to be rimed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland," Sidney said.
Sadly the practice died out while the rat lived on. Even Shakespeare, who recognised a dirty rat when he saw one, recorded this humane and uniquely Irish means of pest, control in As You Like It, when Rosalind notes the charming practice of lulling rats to sleep through poetry. It was cheap, cultured, efficient and deadly. "I was never so be rhymed since Pythagoras time that I was an Irish rat."