Rats: Beat ‘em, Eat ‘em

In a story that seems straight out of a Terry Pratchett novel, a politician in India is encouraging people to eat rats. According to Vijay Prakash, doing so would benefit not just the bottom-tier Musahar caste he suggests eat rodents - an abundant and hitherto-untapped source of free or very cheap food - but also the rest of the country, by helping control the rat population, and thereby preserving the country’s grain stocks - half of which, apparently, gets eaten by rodents every year.

It’s brilliant, kind of: Kill two birds with one stone, and everyone benefits - except, I guess, the rats.

Prakash even suggests the creation of rat farms: I can’t see the point, myself; I really don’t see there being a rat shortage in India any time soon, no matter how popular the ‘delicacy’ becomes. Also, the rat farms are going to work against the whole rodent-control issue, aren’t they?

(In one of his Ankh Morpork books, Terry Pratchett relates the story of a rat problem in the city, which the Patrician had attempted to resolve by instituting a bounty. Months went by, thousands and thousands of rats were brought in every day, the city was bled dry by the bounties, and the rat population seemed unaffected. The city looked into the problem, and the Patrician issued one of those brilliantly simple and highly memorable edicts: “Tax the rat farms.”)

If India does start widespread rat farming, I predict that at least one animal-rights group will complain - never mind the irony that whatever squalor and filth the farms contain, the rats there won’t be any worse off than in the squalor and filth of, let’s face it, the sorts of places “free range” rats otherwise live. (To be fair, there are already commercial rat farms, though they generally aren’t bred for human consumption, and nobody seems to protest or demonstrate too much…)

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