How rats steal eggs

A curiosity of animal behaviour that has always perplexed naturalists and is still not entirely explained is the ability of rats to take hold of hens eggs and transport them considerable distances to their holes and dens. There was a debate on this in the old journal Nature Notes, beginning in May 1898 when a contributor, Edmund Daubeny, reported that a labourer near his home in Market Weston, Norfolk, had discovered stores of unbroken eggs in rat holes. These were in a ditch about half a mile away from the nearest source of eggs at a local farm. How, asked Daubeny, had the rats carried them there?

Nature Notes readers replied with a variety of answers, and Daubeny summarized them in the September issue of the journal. The four most popular suggestions were: that the rats form a line and hand the eggs from one to another; that they roll them along the ground with noses and forepaws; that they hold them under their chins and hop along on their back legs; and finally the old story, that one rat lies on its back, clutching an egg to its stomach while another draws it along by the tail. Daubeny dismissed all these explanations

and he was particularly hard on the last. He asked: Is it likely that any animal would quietly submit to the ordeal of having its tail nipped and being rubbed the wrong way into the bargain? They would bump him terribly over rough ground, to the great danger of the egg; and how long would hair remain on his poor back, or the skin on his tail? The theory lands us in endless difficulties, and I give it up. Despite this rational dismissal, several correspondents repeated stories of rats being seen carrying off eggs, apparently by working out means of collaboration. One wrote that his neighbour in Derbyshire, a truthful sort of person, had on two occasions in his youth seen a rat on its back, clutching an egg between its nose and paws and being carried by two others, one at each end. Another secondhand account, in the Pall Mall Gazette (quoted in E.L. Arnolds Soul of the Beast, 1960), told of a lady whose eggs were being stolen. She hid up in her fowl house, and patiently waited till she saw a large rat run up a short ladder to a nest, and seize an egg between his paws. He then laid himself on his back, and held the egg on his chest. More rats appeared, and, forming themselves into a chain from the ground, they positively drew the rat with the egg

A nineteenth-century Japanese fan painting by Satake Eikai showing rats carrying away a large egg by dragging one of their number by the tail. Though widely believed, there are no first-hand accounts of this method.
Tail Pieces

413

An engraving which shows three egg-carrying rats negotiating a step by delicately passing the egg one to another.

414

Tail Pieces

down the ladder, passing it along from one to the other till it was safely below. A variation on this is given by the great rat authority, Rodwell, who tells how rats carry eggs up and down stairs. They pass them to each other, with their front paws when going downstairs and with their back legs when going up. More recent observations tend to confirm the traditional account. In the 1980s a television programme which dismissed it as a fable prompted many viewers to respond with accounts of rats with eggs being dragged by the tail. Anthony Wootton in Animal Folklore, Myth and Legend (1986) says that he has literally dozens of such observations and that they are all much the same. Essentially what happens, it seems, is that one rat lies on its back, clasping the egg (or whatever) between all four legs and paws, and is then dragged along by the tail, or sometimes the scruff of the neck, by the second; alternatively, the prone rat grasps the leaders tail in its teeth, thus making its passage slightly more comfortable, perhaps, in that it proceeds with the lie of the fur. The most

amazing account came from a man who witnessed a line of four rats, each holding in its teeth the tail of the one in front while the last one lay on its back clutching an egg. When they had taken the egg to where they wanted it they all returned and took another, drawing it along in the same way and taking five eggs in all. There are even accounts of one rat pulling another by slinging its tail over its shoulder and grasping it with its paws, like a man dragging a sled. Wootton says that he has seen a nineteenthcentury ornament carved with this scene. Scientists are generally sceptical about all these stories (mainly because they are frightened of anthropomorphizing or attributing human-type reasoning to animals) and it is unfortunate that there are no authentic photographs of egg-stealing rats. Someone who could have taken one was Mark Atkinson, a farmer on the Somerset Mendips, who told John Michell that as a young man he had seen an egg-clutching rat being dragged along by another, but instead of running for his camera he fetched a shotgun and blew the vermin away.

Rat Kings
In the case of Monkey
chains

(see p.410) the experts

are divided on the credibility of the various accounts. In contrast, the story of the rat Kings is one of a peasant superstition that was verified, only to sink into obscurity. As curiosities go, the rat King seems even more obscure than most; even in its heyday it was hardly known outside Central Europe.

A rat King consists of a number of rats found with their tails inextricably tied together in a central knot. Another name for this fearful conglomeration is the Rat Kings Throne. All the reports of rat Kings agree that only black rats are involved in these mysterious minglings; and one reason for the rarity of the phenomenon today might be the savage depletion of the black rat population by the hordes of brown rats that invaded Central Europe from the region of the Caspian Sea in the eighteenth century. Most rat Kings have been found in continental Europe none is known from Britain or the USA and little has been written about

rat Kings in English; most accounts have never been translated out of their French and German originals. The earliest depiction of a King dates to 1564, and there is a reference by Martin Luther to one in 1524, so they must have been well known before that date. The naturalist Alfred Brehm collected stories of rat Kings, but when his Thierleben (187679) was translated into the multi-volume Library of Natural History, the editor, Richard Lydekker, saw fit to omit Brehms pages on the subject. The ground for the popular belief in rat Kings derives from the popular folk belief that each species of animal had its own society presided over by a king. The pioneer of cryptozoology, Conrad Gesner, wrote in 1555 of the belief that there were venerable rats who grew in size as they grew more ancient, and were tended by a pack who would steal food and fine velvet for their lord. No giant rat, imprisoned in splendour in a disused barn or cellar, was ever discovered, but as the original plague of black rats spread through Europe and ratting became a secure career for man and dog, the title of rat King was transferred to the occasional discovery of one of these tangled terrors of
Tail Pieces

415