The mother rat is very careful and fussy about her young until they get to a certain age. When they have passed this period, however, and the mother should, on some bright day, feel a trifle hungry, she would as readily devour her offspring as the children would make a meal of her, thus returning the compliment neatly. Individual cases of this kind occur also amongst the canine family, where dog-bitches have dined royally on a majority of their newly born pups. This tends to show that man is not the only intelligent animal who occasionally uses his fellow's carcass for fodder. Cannibalism, in the rat's case, takes place generally when they are unable to get any other diet, but then they will devour one another with gusto, skin, tail, bones, feathers, and all; the stronger killing the weaker and sucking the blood first. Hot blood is one of their greatest delicacies. The rats are born blind and naked, and their bodies are at this time of their life in a wobbly and unformed state. In this condition they would probably not be looked on by outsiders as things of beauty or delicate morsels, yet they are eagerly sought after by the old male rat to furnish him with his Sunday dinner dessert. The male pigs, cats, ferrets, and rabbits also indulge in the same pastime. This is made still more of a highly prized food for the old man rat by its rarity, as the mother will fight to protect her young with the boldness and savageness of a lioness defending her cubs. She will even go to the pathetic extent of chewing up her young ones herself rather than let them fall into the hands of her oppressor. The rats have an arrangement amongst them similar to the old Greek health law of killing off all sickly infants, that is, they eat their dead and infirm. This accounts for the fact that rats are never found at large sick, diseased, or disabled. Although, as a rule, it isn't considered the correct thing with us to dine or breakfast from our departed fathers-in-law or uncles, yet in the present case, peculiar as it may seem, it is the only admirable trait about the rat. It forms a safeguard to man against their increase, yet we must add, in a hurry, that the check put upon their growth by their cannibalism is lamentably small when compared to their enormous multiplying powers, which surpass those of any other animal.
The writer had a curious experience in regard to the rat's sociability and companionship. He had once confined in a cage a company of twelve big slaughter-house rats and happened to neglect feeding them one evening. The next morning he was rather astonished to find a well polished backbone, a stubby remnant of tail, and only eleven other rats, all huddled up together compactly, in the congregation. He then gave them some food to stop them from further feeding on each other, but they rudely refused this, and he was again surprised to see ten of the number make a combined attack, that looked as if agreed upon, upon one unfortunate but especially large sized rat. The latter tried desperately enough to hold his own against such fearful odds, with much horrible squealing and screaming among them and a great deal of severe scratching, dashing, and tumbling against the tin-lined sides and the wire roofing of the cage. In a few seconds they were ranged all around in a circle feeding ravenously on the remains of the brave but ill-fated warrior. The writer has noticed, in numerous instances where numbers of rats were kept together in a cage, that they would on some occasions, just as the humor seemed to strike them, prefer their relatives and brethren as food to anything else. It did not matter, either, what other form of diet or delicacy had been set before them.
V.—MULTIPLYING POWERS.
Great quantities of rats are trapped and poisoned and hunted down by all animals larger than themselves; they are driven out of their homes, and systematically destroyed by paid vermin-destroyers; still all this seems to make but very slight impression on their numbers as they constantly pop up serenely from below just as if "Sure Pop" and rat-traps had only a mythic existence in fairy tales. They multiply prodigiously, the female breeding on the average about eight times a year, and having as many as fourteen at a litter, though in some instances this record has been badly beaten. A writer on this subject calculates that from a single pair of New York rats, living in moderately good circumstances, there will spring in three years' time a snug, happy little family of 650,000 rodents, including mother, father, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc., and making due allowance for emergencies, accidents, and for a few hundred of them having been overpowered and used for food by the rest of this most worshipful company. He allows an average of eight young at a litter, half male and half female, the young ones having a litter at six months old. One cause of their being so prolific is that they flourish and breed as well on an abundance of swill, refuse, and garbage, as if they were carefully and tenderly fed three times a day.
VI.—THE RAT'S UNABRIDGED BILL OF FARE.
Next to the ostrich, the rat possesses the most capacious and accommodating kind of stomach. He will swallow anything, digestible or otherwise, although he can appreciate good things with much intelligence, when he comes across them. His bill of fare ranges all the way up from tallow-candles and shingles to roast-partridge and old boots. Rats are broadly omnivorous, and their food varies widely with their situation. They will eat soap, from the harsh and strong smelling washerwoman's kind to the richly perfumed and tinted toilet variety. With a vast and admirable toleration, they will feed upon bacon, sponges, ham, roots, flour, pork, roast-fowl, from boarding-house chicken to the microscopic quail; they will consume confectionery, potatoes, tomatoes, turnips, other vegetables, fruit of every description, from huckleberries to watermelons, raw, boiled, broiled, or fried fish, suet, eggs, bread, mutton, cheese, and butter. Also raw, cooked, boiled, broiled, fried, smoked, or roast-beef, and they swallow with keen relish wines of all brands and vintages, beer, whisky, gin, and brandy, and evince a loving fondness for all grades of oil, from the dirtiest, coarsest whale's blubber to the finest olive. The rat is verily a most cosmopolitan glutton, and enjoys the favorite dishes of the various nations with much the same hearty appreciation throughout, hugely delighting himself with frog's hind-legs in France, pickled herrings in Holland, potatoes roasted on the hearth in Ireland, pumpernickel and sourkrout in Germany, anise-seed, garlic, and olla podrida in Spain, birds'-nest, sharks' fins, and meat furnished by the rat's own brethren in China, caviare and candles with the Russians, roast-beef and ale in England, and pork-and-beans and peanuts with the people of a certain division of North America.
Drawing the line at a particular point in the rats' endeavors to obtain "belly timber," as Sancho puts it, is an obsolete custom with them, for they devour putrid carrion, and human flesh, too, comes within this category, a further account of which will be found in the course of the next chapter.
VII.—FEROCITY.
The rat is dangerously ferocious when aroused, and is capable of being wrought up to a pitch of white heat fury. If he should be caught, his tail cut, his hair burnt, or if he should be wounded in any other way, but not sufficiently to weaken his system or momentary capacity, and he is then let loose, he will, through sheer madness and pure "cussedness," hunt up, fight, and overpower his brethren individually, or else put them to flight in a body, without much ado. In fact, when he is worked up to this state, he wouldn't hesitate for a moment to attack an entire army of rats, or of other far bigger and more terrible objects. In many cases like this, rats have often obligingly rid premises of their own kind. If the tortured or maimed rat is in a weak condition afterwards, he will be promptly overpowered by the other members of the rat community upon general principles.