“Rodents stuck together could not survive long and are probably in agony and distress until they separate or die,” says Kevin Rowe, a rat expert and the senior curator of mammals at the Museum Victoria in Australia. “A ‘rat king’ would be a horrible ball of animal suffering; nothing about it evokes a sense of kingship.”
“Rat kings may just be a myth that a few people have perpetuated with fake examples,” says Matthew Combs, a doctoral student focusing on rats at Fordham University, even if the motivations of the modern rat king fabricator are less than clear, and the fabrication itself not necessarily easy. The fabricator, for one, would have to tie the rats’ tails together after they were dead, since doing so while they were alive would be “virtually impossible,” Burns notes.
Still, real or not, rat kings might always be with us, the result of humans’ loathing of rats themselves. More rats together, in our eyes, just means more of the things we revile about rats in the first place.
“In medieval times, people were pretty anti-rat, especially if you saw some seething mass.,” Burns says. “People really just don’t like rats.”
And, for her, the research goes on. She and her collaborators plan to take a closer look at the knot in their specimen to figure out what kind of adhesive stuck the tails together and to create a model using X-rays for how the rats might have gotten themselves tangled in the first place. Lab studies with live rats, meanwhile, could, in theory, be done, but, Combs says there wouldn’t be much point. “An observation of a rat king forming from start to finish in a lab setting would be the ultimate support,” he says, “but that seems like it would take a good deal of time and luck and precious lab funding.”
And, for her, the research goes on. She and her collaborators plan to take a closer look at the knot in their specimen to figure out what kind of adhesive stuck the tails together and to create a model using X-rays for how the rats might have gotten themselves tangled in the first place. Lab studies with live rats, meanwhile, could, in theory, be done, but, Combs says there wouldn’t be much point. “An observation of a rat king forming from start to finish in a lab setting would be the ultimate support,” he says, “but that seems like it would take a good deal of time and luck and precious lab funding.”
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