![]() ![]() “When we see a rat at night, we mostly encounter it by accident, and it stuns us a bit,” he said. We encounter them in the dark, when we’re most susceptible to fear, Sanguinetti-Scheck pointed out. Unlike squirrels, which we tend to see in the light of day, rats are nocturnal. Name one fluffy animal that humans find gross … see? (Etymology lends credence to the notion that fluffy tails are perhaps the essential characteristic of squirreldom: The scientific name of the American red squirrel, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, translates to “the steward who sits in the shadow of his tail.”)Īlso working against rats are where and when we generally encounter them-wrong place, wrong time. And the underlying principle here seems to hold true across species, not just for rats and squirrels. Just look at a squirrel’s tail! “You gotta admit,” one Quora commentator writes, “that’s pretty darned cute.” A rat’s, not so much. This tends to be the first thing that comes up in any conversation about our attitudes toward squirrels and rats. The squirrel’s is big and bushy, the rat’s is naked, scaly, and wormlike. The point is that most people seem to acknowledge that whatever their personal feelings about these critters (and don’t even start on mice or gerbils or capybaras), public opinion skews pro-squirrel and anti-rat. “Including gas.”īut that’s not really the point. ![]() “All the killing devices of modern warfare will be used in the effort to annihilate the squirrel army,” vowed one local newspaper. In 1918, California conscripted children into a week-long war on squirrels. “Squirrels,” one Redditor writes, “are total dicks.” Such antipathy is nothing new. These detractors note that squirrels are responsible for up to one in five American power outages, cause thousands of house fires a year, and, from time to time, indiscriminately attack humans. (“She was very supportive,” he assured me.) Then there are those who argue that squirrels are actually gross-“tree rats,” they call them, distinguished from their sewer-dwelling cousins only by some minor technicalities. “The sweetest little guys around.” Once, Juan Sanguinetti-Scheck, a rodent researcher at Harvard, stopped oncoming traffic to save an injured baby rat … while on a date. There are those who reject it on the grounds that rats are actually cute-“Just like tiny dogs!” they say. Not everyone accepts the popular consensus on rats and squirrels. Things get ad hominem-or rather, ad rodentem. “Squirrels are just rats with cuter outfits.” Numerous Reddit threads and Quora posts have also posed the question in one form or another, prompting lots of impassioned (and sometimes implausible) hypotheses. “You can’t make friends with a squirrel,” Sarah Jessica Parker declares on Sex and the City. Christoph Waltz, playing a Nazi colonel, deploys the enigma to justify the Holocaust in the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds. The absurdist TV series Portlandia takes it up in a sketch featuring three hipster rat puppets confounded by the preferential treatment afforded to their bushy-tailed brethren. People have been pondering this question for years. And yet, for all their similarities, they elicit wildly different reactions from humans. “Like with a fur coat and a dog’s nose.” It’s true: The two rodents do look remarkably alike. “I kind of think of squirrels as rats in costumes,” he told me. Then, all of a sudden, he felt as though he was looking at an optical illusion: When he viewed the squirrel one way, he saw a squirrel when he viewed it another way, he saw a rat. Dantzer, a rodent researcher at the University of Michigan, was standing in the Canadian Yukon, scrutinizing the uncooperative squirrel, which was perched high in a spruce tree. Ben Dantzer had spent several frustrating days trying to capture a single squirrel when the epiphany arrived.
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