![]() ![]() Humans in turn often eat Arvicanthis, when they can catch this mostly vegetarian rat, but the loss of grain protein to Arvicanthis far exceeds what is recovered in meat from those who are snared. No matter what the Pharaoh Cheops and his successors thought they were doing, no matter what their scribes wrote down, and no matter what anyone believed about an afterlife, the Giza pyramids and Sphinx are first and foremost monuments to a temporary conquest of rats by the first civilization to entice help from cats.īy enlisting cats, the Egyptian civilization for a few millennia held in check the population of Arvicanthis, the Nile cane rat, which ravages crops throughout Africa. ![]() I mmersing myself in Rat, by Jonathan Burt, and Rats, by Robert Sullivan, during my flight to Egypt for the December 2007 Middle East Network on Animal Welfare conference, I sat a few evenings later in front of the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx during a bombastic sound and light show and contemplated the role of rats in creating the spectacle before me. Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivanīloomsbury (175 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10010), 2004. ![]() (33 Great Sutton St., London EC1M 3JU, U.K.), 2006.ġ89 pages, paperback. ![]()
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