Cages

Recently, one of our remaining two pet rats died, of old age. Now for a rat, old age means basically anything over 2.5 years, and of course most rats in the wild don’t live anywhere near as long as rats bred to be pets. (They make great pets by the way; they are intelligent, sociable, and they don’t smell; that is more that you can say about a lot of teenagers!). Her time had come, and she went very quickly. And now there is one rat left, one of what was originally a community of three sisters. By rat standards, their lives were incredibly privileged: they never went without food or water, and never had to worry about predators. But the price of privilege was living in a cage. It was a big cage as far as cages go: two stories, with ramps, nooks and crannies and lots of toys. If this cage were Toronto real estate it would go for half a million dollars; it was high end rodent condo lifestyle.

But it was still a cage.

And here we are, into year two of the pandemic, and so many of us are chafing in our cages, and I can’t help but feel that many of those doing the most chafing are the most privileged. Non-precarious housing, employment that allows working remotely, high-speed internet, not wondering where our next meal is coming from, so many of us are in a position to weather the storm; we are the rats in luxury cages.

Rats in the wild instinctively burrow and hide: theirs is a life of cracks, crevices and corners. Hiding during the day, with furtive excursions after dark; theirs is by definition a marginal existence. But living in the margins gives them the only sense of safety they can have, and of course safety is a relative term for a feral rodent. Even our pet rats, living in their completely safe environment, never lost their instincts to burrow, hide in corners and stay quiet during the day. Millions of years of instincts have made them a very successful species.

And by comparison, we humans, comparative newcomers in evolutionary terms, don’t seem to have learned any lessons from creatures seen as vermin. Even when our cages are comfortable and safe, during this pandemic we push to leave them to indulge ourselves, or are forced to leave them for precarious employment for the enrichment of the truly privileged in our society. The result? Wave after wave of pandemic. For as much as these times are characterized by the wearing of masks, in many ways it is also a time of the tearing off the collective mask of our species, and exposing collectively what we truly are.

I bet the rats will outlive us.