AI transcript
0:00:02 (dramatic music)
0:00:06 – Are you a chef?
0:00:08 Are you a home cook?
0:00:09 – I can cook.
0:00:10 (laughing)
0:00:12 – He says reluctantly.
0:00:15 – I sometimes cook well, not always.
0:00:17 – Do you happen to make a nicer ratatouille?
0:00:19 – Yeah, I’ve made ratatouille before,
0:00:21 but I don’t have the skill, taste, and feeling
0:00:23 to make a great ratatouille.
0:00:26 The thing is, it’s just a bunch of vegetables, right?
0:00:27 – Well, yes, but no.
0:00:28 – Yes, but no, exactly.
0:00:31 And that’s the thing, ratatouille is a theme
0:00:33 and a title for the film.
0:00:36 That was there from the beginning for a number of reasons.
0:00:39 First of all, it’s about rats, and ratatouille,
0:00:41 it tells you it’s a comedy ’cause it’s a silly word,
0:00:46 and ratatouille is the quintessential peasant dish.
0:00:50 It’s just vegetables, it’s stuff that you can find easily.
0:00:53 If you know how to cook it well, it’s beautiful.
0:00:57 – I’m speaking here with Jan Pinkover.
0:01:01 I worked on a couple of the early feature films of Pixar,
0:01:06 including A Bug’s Life and Monsters Inc and Toy Story 2,
0:01:10 and I got a break to develop my own feature film.
0:01:14 – That feature film was ratatouille.
0:01:15 It’s about a rat named Remi,
0:01:18 who lives in a farmhouse in the French countryside
0:01:20 and dreams of becoming a chef.
0:01:25 – You found cheese, and not just any cheese,
0:01:27 it’s home to Chevron to pay.
0:01:30 That would go beautifully with my mushroom.
0:01:34 – But then, Remi, his family, and his entire rat tribe
0:01:36 are chased into exile,
0:01:38 and he winds up in the sewers of Paris.
0:01:40 As he explores the city above ground,
0:01:44 Remi comes across the legendary Gusteau’s Restaurant.
0:01:47 The late chef Auguste Gusteau was Remi’s hero.
0:01:51 His famous book is called Anyone Can Cook.
0:01:54 But Remi sees that Gusteau’s restaurant is now run
0:01:58 by a corrupt tyrannical chef,
0:02:00 and there’s a new garbage boy in the kitchen
0:02:01 named Linguini.
0:02:07 – Garbage boy, you are cooking.
0:02:11 Out there, you’re cooking my kitchen.
0:02:15 – Linguini does want to cook, but he doesn’t have much talent.
0:02:19 Remi has talent, but he’s a rat.
0:02:21 So the two of them become secret collaborators.
0:02:25 One look, and I knew we had the same crazy idea.
0:02:31 – Remi hides on top of Linguini’s head
0:02:33 under his chef’s toque,
0:02:36 and becomes his puppet master chef.
0:02:39 Together, they make beautiful food, potato leek soup,
0:02:41 the perfect French omelet,
0:02:45 and a twist on sweet bread’s à la Gusteau.
0:02:49 It turns out that Linguini is the son of the great Gusteau,
0:02:52 and the secret collaboration between Linguini and Remi
0:02:57 turns out to be a big hit, as was the film itself.
0:02:59 Ratatouille, released in 2007,
0:03:02 won the Oscar for best animated feature,
0:03:05 and it grossed over half a billion dollars.
0:03:08 That made Ratatouille a big outlier in Hollywood,
0:03:12 and Remi the rat was an outlier too.
0:03:14 As we’ve been learning in this series on rats,
0:03:18 it is a rare day when a rat is the hero of any story.
0:03:21 Since the days of the bubonic plague,
0:03:24 rats have been associated with death and disease.
0:03:28 To call someone a rat is a special kind of insult.
0:03:32 It suggests they’ve behaved so badly as to be subhuman.
0:03:37 But is it time to reassess the rat’s reputation,
0:03:39 perhaps even rehabilitate it?
0:03:41 Today, on Freakinomics Radio,
0:03:45 we dissect Ratatouille with Jan Pinkova.
0:03:48 – In a way, Ratatouille is like ballet dancing with Nazis.
0:03:52 We look at why rats have been so valuable to human science.
0:03:55 – Like, right all the way down to DNA.
0:03:57 – And we hear a love story.
0:04:00 – Not to say anything negative about the hamsters of the world,
0:04:03 but I think it’s a different relationship.
0:04:05 – Come along for this third and final episode
0:04:09 in our series, “Sympathy for the Rat.”
0:04:11 (upbeat music)
0:04:14 (jazz music)
0:04:22 – This is Freakinomics Radio,
0:04:25 the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything
0:04:28 with your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:04:30 (upbeat music)
0:04:41 – We humans really love some animals,
0:04:44 two-thirds of American households have at least one pet,
0:04:45 most of them dogs or cats.
0:04:48 We often treat them like members of the family.
0:04:52 When we hear about an animal being mistreated or killed,
0:04:54 the outcry can be as loud as if it happened
0:04:57 to a fellow human, if not louder.
0:05:02 And yet, in 2022, when New York City Mayor Eric Adams
0:05:06 declared war on rats and appointed a rat czar
0:05:10 to get rid of them, there was almost no outcry.
0:05:13 The rat seems to have crossed some invisible border
0:05:17 from animal to pest, even menace.
0:05:19 But it wasn’t always thus.
0:05:21 – The first rats that were domesticated,
0:05:24 they were pets in Victorian England
0:05:26 and they were not thought of as negatively
0:05:29 as we think about even pet rats today.
0:05:33 So it was revered to have a rat on your shoulder.
0:05:34 – This is Julia Zichello.
0:05:37 She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan
0:05:40 and is an evolutionary biologist at Hunter College.
0:05:44 But her rat experience is not just academic.
0:05:47 – During the pandemic, I got a car for the first time
0:05:50 because alternate side of the street parking was relaxed.
0:05:52 I kept it in one place for too long.
0:05:55 I also don’t really drive that often.
0:05:58 So yeah, so when I went to start it, it didn’t start.
0:06:01 And I had to get a toad and the mechanic told me
0:06:04 that there was a bedding in there connected with rats
0:06:06 and also orange peels.
0:06:07 – This was in the engine?
0:06:09 – This was in the engine.
0:06:11 It was the late fall, early winter,
0:06:12 which is just the time that they would be
0:06:14 looking for a warm place.
0:06:16 I thought it was really funny at first
0:06:19 before I got the bill from the mechanic.
0:06:22 – What did it look like inside the engine?
0:06:23 – The wires were gnawed.
0:06:26 You can see shards or pieces of the wire
0:06:29 and then the orange peels and some dry leaves
0:06:32 and other things that they were using for nesting material.
0:06:34 – I know that rats are extraordinarily fertile.
0:06:36 They have really short gestation.
0:06:37 They have a lot of pups.
0:06:39 Do you know if maybe your car was also
0:06:41 a rat baby hospital as well?
0:06:43 – I don’t know, but it may have been,
0:06:44 which is, you know, kind of cute.
0:06:51 – Zkello had never thought deeply about rats
0:06:53 until they moved into her car.
0:06:56 And even then, her attitude was relaxed.
0:06:58 She wasn’t strongly anti-rat,
0:07:01 nor did she find a reason to become pro-rat.
0:07:04 But soon after the car incident, things changed.
0:07:05 – Yeah.
0:07:08 So I inherited rats from a family member
0:07:11 who moved to a building that could no longer have pets.
0:07:15 The rats were already, I believe, 18 months old.
0:07:17 I felt the same way most people would feel.
0:07:19 They’re like, oh, no way kind of thing.
0:07:20 Like, oh my gosh, their tails.
0:07:23 Everyone’s so upset about their tails
0:07:24 because they’re so gross.
0:07:28 But, you know, then I warmed to them over time.
0:07:30 Eventually, because you’re feeding it,
0:07:32 because it’s a little bit lovely,
0:07:34 then you end up feeling some warmth towards it.
0:07:37 – What kind of rats were your pet rats?
0:07:38 – They were two different breeds.
0:07:41 One was agouti, and that was sort of silver-colored.
0:07:43 The other was a hooded rat,
0:07:45 which was white with just a little bit of black
0:07:47 on their head and striped down their back.
0:07:49 – Can I have some names, please?
0:07:52 – One was named Sylvie, and the other was Pele.
0:07:53 They were both males.
0:07:56 – So you didn’t have any breeding, obviously.
0:07:58 – Correct, no offspring.
0:08:00 You know, they were fun to watch.
0:08:02 They were interactive.
0:08:04 They eat a lot of different things.
0:08:09 We had some fun feeding them the circular corn chips.
0:08:10 They would take the corn chip
0:08:12 like you would a steering wheel of a car
0:08:16 and turn it around and eat it around the edges.
0:08:18 One thing I noticed about the two pet rats
0:08:20 is that they had different personalities
0:08:21 from one another.
0:08:22 Sylvie was much more bold,
0:08:25 and Pele was much more cryptic.
0:08:27 They ate food in different ways.
0:08:29 Pele would take the food and go into this little hidey box,
0:08:33 and Sylvie would just unabashedly eat the food
0:08:34 out there in front of you.
0:08:36 – Do they vocalize?
0:08:37 – They did, not a lot.
0:08:39 Technically, rats do vocalize.
0:08:41 – It was only when they were socializing with each other
0:08:43 would they vocalize when they were hanging with you?
0:08:45 – Only when we were socializing with each other.
0:08:47 They were not super vocal that I heard.
0:08:49 And I think there are sounds we can hear.
0:08:52 – Can you imitate the sounds that you did hear?
0:08:55 – I don’t know about that.
0:08:58 Is it like a squeaking kind of thing?
0:09:01 – Yes, very, very light squeaking.
0:09:03 Not like long vocalizations.
0:09:05 They were not singing.
0:09:07 There’s been some research showing that rats can laugh
0:09:08 when they’re tickled.
0:09:11 Those are things that you can’t hear with the human ear,
0:09:12 though there were special recordings
0:09:14 that were showing that.
0:09:16 – Here’s what those special recordings sound like.
0:09:24 – They also were very responsive to all of the sounds
0:09:26 in the environment, in the apartment,
0:09:28 things like the coffee grinder.
0:09:29 I was noticing that the hooded rat
0:09:32 was really stressed out when I was grinding coffee.
0:09:33 – So what would you do about that?
0:09:35 – I mean, I couldn’t do anything.
0:09:37 I had no room to move them
0:09:39 and I couldn’t stop drinking coffee.
0:09:41 – Did you take your grinder into the bathroom
0:09:43 or a closet or something?
0:09:44 – No, no.
0:09:48 I just noted it and continued on with the grinding.
0:09:51 You know, their sensory systems are so acute.
0:09:52 Obviously, their olfaction,
0:09:54 their sense of smell is really good.
0:09:55 Their hearing is really good
0:09:58 and they seem very sensitive to things in their environment.
0:10:03 It did also make me think about the rats in New York City.
0:10:04 There aren’t a lot of studies
0:10:07 about the behavior of wild rats
0:10:10 from the perspective of the rats.
0:10:11 One of the things I thought about
0:10:14 after having the pet rats is that I wonder
0:10:17 if the rats in New York City are very, very stressed.
0:10:19 They like to be underground.
0:10:21 When you see them skittering across the sidewalk,
0:10:23 it stresses you out,
0:10:26 but I’m pretty sure that they’re also highly stressed.
0:10:29 – Is it possible that one partial solution
0:10:32 to the infestation of wild rats in a city like New York
0:10:36 would be the widespread embrace of pet rats?
0:10:39 – I don’t know about the widespread embrace of pet rats,
0:10:42 but I think the rats are in New York.
0:10:44 I think that she should have a pet rat.
0:10:47 If you want to control them or if you want to love them,
0:10:49 you have to know about them.
0:10:51 (gentle music)
0:10:54 (gentle music)
0:10:56 I first came across Julia Zichello
0:10:57 when I read a piece she wrote
0:11:01 for a hyper-local news site called The West Side Rag.
0:11:04 If you live on the Upper West Side and don’t read The Rag,
0:11:06 well, I don’t even know what to say.
0:11:10 Here is the first line of Zichello’s piece.
0:11:13 Almost a year has passed and I can finally write about it.
0:11:16 – So they both passed away, sadly.
0:11:18 One of the things that happened towards the end of their life,
0:11:21 which also is something that’s relevant to all rats,
0:11:23 is that they aged so quickly
0:11:26 and they started to show signs of aging,
0:11:29 like being hunched over, losing body fat.
0:11:32 One month in a rat’s life is equal to three years
0:11:34 in human years.
0:11:36 People know this because there’s a lot of people,
0:11:37 obviously who use rats in the lab,
0:11:41 trying to study aging and trying to make that equivalent.
0:11:43 So they aged very rapidly.
0:11:46 We don’t really exactly know why they died.
0:11:49 They didn’t show any signs of disease that we could see,
0:11:52 but one of the things that happened that was very sad
0:11:54 is that Sylvie died first
0:11:57 and then for Pele, he was alone.
0:12:01 So we bought him a little toy that was the shape of a rat
0:12:03 because I knew that he would be lonely.
0:12:05 It was a cat toy.
0:12:07 He was not interested in the cat toy
0:12:09 and then he died less than a week later.
0:12:12 This is typical of rats because they’re so social
0:12:14 and they really like to have other rats around.
0:12:18 – So Pele died, you think of heartbreak, essentially?
0:12:19 – I think maybe, yeah.
0:12:22 We knew that the lifespan of domestic rats
0:12:25 is around two years and they were two and a half years old.
0:12:27 So, you know, they lived a good life.
0:12:30 We certainly appreciated them and learned a lot.
0:12:33 – I wanna read a couple sentences from the piece you wrote.
0:12:35 I regularly walk the Upper West Side
0:12:38 and spot swashbuckling rats at all hours,
0:12:41 but other times I find them squashed.
0:12:44 I don’t exactly feel sad about the dead rats,
0:12:46 but I also don’t feel nothing.
0:12:49 The dead rats make me think about life, death,
0:12:53 and somewhere stuffed between the pavement and the pellage.
0:12:56 I guess pellage is the fur of the rat, yes?
0:12:57 – Correct, yeah.
0:12:59 – There is something about love in there too.
0:13:02 Can you say more about that love?
0:13:06 – I will never see a squashed rat in New York City again
0:13:09 and not think about our pet rats.
0:13:10 I know that they are different.
0:13:13 The rats in the wild are more aggressive.
0:13:16 It wouldn’t be the same thing as the pet rats
0:13:17 that I experienced.
0:13:20 But I mean, of course you’d think about your pet.
0:13:22 – Are you going to replace them?
0:13:23 Maybe that’s unfair to say.
0:13:25 Are you going to get more rats?
0:13:27 – Definitely not.
0:13:29 I’m definitely not getting pet rats again.
0:13:30 – Because why?
0:13:31 – It’s too heartbreaking.
0:13:32 Their lifespan is too short
0:13:35 and the relationship between their charm
0:13:38 and their lifespan is too asymmetrical.
0:13:45 – Julia Zichello, as a scientist living in New York,
0:13:47 is by now familiar with what you might call
0:13:49 the three main categories of rat.
0:13:51 The wild ones who live on the streets,
0:13:54 the domesticated ones who live in your home,
0:13:59 and the rats that are bred to live and die in research labs.
0:14:02 – There are many studies across neuroscience
0:14:05 and pharmaceuticals and psychology
0:14:08 that used rats for decades.
0:14:10 The rats that are lab rats
0:14:14 are more genetically homogenous than wild rats.
0:14:18 Rats and humans shared a common ancestor 90 million years ago.
0:14:20 That’s not super close,
0:14:23 but it’s close enough to have revealed things
0:14:26 about the brain and behavior and genetics
0:14:29 that have ultimately helped humans.
0:14:31 So I wonder about how many people
0:14:32 have technically been helped by that
0:14:35 versus the number of people who have been harmed
0:14:38 by diseases they may have acquired from a rat.
0:14:40 – What was the common ancestor?
0:14:42 – The common ancestor was an animal
0:14:44 that lived in the late Cretaceous
0:14:47 around the time of the dinosaurs.
0:14:48 There’s not a specific name,
0:14:51 but we use genetics to understand
0:14:54 how far back these common ancestors lived.
0:14:57 The anatomy and behavior of that common ancestor
0:15:01 was much more rat-like than it is human-like.
0:15:03 They were likely nocturnal.
0:15:06 Some of them may have been insectivores,
0:15:07 and their basic anatomy
0:15:09 was much more rat-like than humans.
0:15:11 – For all the parallels there may be
0:15:13 between a rodent like a rat and humans,
0:15:18 one gigantic difference is fertility and lifespan.
0:15:21 Is that meaningful in any significant way to us?
0:15:25 – Yeah, so that makes rats good model organisms
0:15:27 because you can have many offspring
0:15:30 within your human life as a scientist studying them.
0:15:32 So you can see how things translate
0:15:34 from one generation to the next.
0:15:38 One rat female can have up to 72 pups per year.
0:15:41 And if we think about a rat pair,
0:15:43 so a male and a female,
0:15:45 and you think about them having offspring
0:15:47 and those offspring having offspring,
0:15:51 within one year there can be like 1,200 rats born
0:15:53 just from that pair.
0:15:55 From the perspective of controlling rats in the wild,
0:15:56 that’s a problem,
0:15:59 but from the perspective of using rats in the lab,
0:16:00 that’s a virtue.
0:16:05 – Coming up after the break,
0:16:08 what other virtues does the lab rat have?
0:16:10 – If you want an animal to press a lever
0:16:12 and receive a drug,
0:16:15 a rat is generally the better choice.
0:16:18 – And how did the rat become a lab animal in the first place?
0:16:19 I’m Stephen Dovner,
0:16:22 this is Freakonomics Radio, we’ll be right back.
0:16:34 In one recent year,
0:16:37 the market for laboratory rats in the US
0:16:39 was estimated at one and a half billion dollars.
0:16:42 And that number is expected to rise
0:16:45 as biomedical research keeps expanding.
0:16:48 The cost of a lab rat can range from around $25 a piece
0:16:50 to a few thousand dollars
0:16:54 for a specially bred or genetically engineered specimen.
0:16:56 But as many lab rats as there are,
0:17:00 they are outnumbered by lab mice.
0:17:01 – Oh, they’re cheaper, they’re smaller.
0:17:03 – That is Bethany Brookshire.
0:17:05 We heard from her in part one of this series,
0:17:08 she’s the author of a book called “Pests,
0:17:11 How Humans Create Animal Villains”.
0:17:14 – Especially now with the advent of CRISPR technologies
0:17:19 that allow us to alter adult genetics and fetal genetics.
0:17:21 We established that first in mice,
0:17:23 we can do it in rats now,
0:17:25 but it’s very, very well established in mice.
0:17:27 And so that really took off.
0:17:30 – Are there research projects or experiments
0:17:33 for which rats are prima facia better than mice?
0:17:34 – Yes. (laughs)
0:17:37 In my experience, rats are better
0:17:40 for self-administration of drugs.
0:17:44 So if you want an animal to press a lever and receive a drug,
0:17:48 a rat is generally the better choice because of size,
0:17:49 because mice are so small,
0:17:52 it’s really hard to make a lever that they can press.
0:17:54 Well. (laughs)
0:17:56 – I thought you were gonna say that mice,
0:17:58 their hands are too small to hold a joint
0:17:59 and that rats somehow.
0:18:01 – If you could teach them to roll joints,
0:18:04 I imagine that the mice would just roll a smaller one.
0:18:07 (gentle music)
0:18:08 Before she was a science writer,
0:18:10 Brookshire was a practicing scientist
0:18:12 at the Wake Forest School of Medicine,
0:18:16 where she got a PhD in physiology and pharmacology.
0:18:20 – I studied primarily drugs of abuse in graduate school
0:18:23 and then I studied antidepressants for my postdoc.
0:18:25 – What were some drugs that you were giving to mice and rats?
0:18:29 – Ritalin, cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy,
0:18:32 alcohol, Prozac.
0:18:34 If you wanna be really nerdy about it,
0:18:36 I studied the dopamine serotonodic interactions
0:18:37 in the ventral tegmental area,
0:18:40 nucleus accompaniment circuit of the mouse brain.
0:18:42 – That was gonna be my guess, but you know.
0:18:45 – Yeah, so I was interested in drugs
0:18:48 that primarily targeted dopaminergic systems.
0:18:50 – And what were you looking for?
0:18:54 – I was interested in chronic high dose administration
0:18:57 of methylphenidate, which is Ritalin.
0:19:01 Humans, we give people Ritalin starting at very young ages.
0:19:04 So I was very interested in what chronic exposure
0:19:08 to these drugs means for the brain as you get older.
0:19:13 Does it make you more or less susceptible to drug addiction?
0:19:14 – And what’d you learn?
0:19:16 – It’s tough to say.
0:19:20 I did show that in some animals,
0:19:24 you get tolerance to other drugs that are similar.
0:19:26 In some, you get sensitization.
0:19:29 So they’re more sensitive to the effects.
0:19:31 You also get transferral.
0:19:34 So different drugs that don’t necessarily
0:19:38 primarily hit that pathway will begin to hit that pathway.
0:19:41 – I’ve read that the mouse or rat model in research
0:19:44 can be really fruitful for certain kinds of research,
0:19:46 but unfruitful for others.
0:19:47 What can you tell me about that?
0:19:49 – I can say that, for example,
0:19:51 in the area where I was looking,
0:19:53 which is a group of structures
0:19:54 that we call the basal ganglia,
0:19:57 there’s a lot of similarity between basal ganglias
0:20:01 across all mammals, heck, across like reptiles.
0:20:03 It’s when you get into kind of higher order stuff
0:20:06 that things get more different.
0:20:08 Certainly there are drastic differences
0:20:10 in things like the immune system,
0:20:13 but I do strongly feel that rats and mice
0:20:16 are really essential to our understanding
0:20:18 of the human body and the human brain.
0:20:20 – What are the other things that make mice and rats
0:20:24 still really popular subjects of this kind of research?
0:20:28 Is it that they’re available, cheap, docile,
0:20:31 that they breed quickly, that they respond quickly?
0:20:36 – Mice and rats have become very popular research animals
0:20:39 in part because they were actually sold that way.
0:20:43 C.C. Little, who founded the Jackson Laboratory in Maine,
0:20:45 which is one of the world’s biggest purveyors
0:20:47 of mice for scientific purposes,
0:20:51 he wrote a piece in Scientific American,
0:20:54 selling the mouse as a lab animal to the public.
0:20:57 The opening line was, “Do you like mice?
0:20:58 Of course you don’t.”
0:21:01 He basically said, “Mice are awful and we hate them,
0:21:03 but they could be heroes of medicine.”
0:21:05 – Wow.
0:21:08 – It can be a replacement for other animals
0:21:09 that we are currently using.
0:21:13 At that time, dogs were a really big research animal.
0:21:17 He proposed mice as being, you know, cheaper, faster.
0:21:19 They do have all of those things.
0:21:24 We have amazing abilities to alter their genetics now.
0:21:27 But all of that stems from the fact
0:21:32 that we consider them pests, we consider them expendable.
0:21:35 – And how do you feel about that as a human?
0:21:36 – It’s complicated.
0:21:39 – Says the woman who, as a scientist,
0:21:42 did her share of rat and mouse experiments.
0:21:43 – Sure did.
0:21:45 – And I’m guessing a bunch of them died
0:21:46 in the process of that, yes?
0:21:48 – Yes, hundreds.
0:21:51 And I feel bad about it.
0:21:55 At the same time, you know, they worked really hard for me.
0:21:56 They worked hard for me.
0:21:58 I liked working with them.
0:22:00 Rats are much sweeter than mice, by the way.
0:22:02 If you’re gonna have one as a pet, have a rat.
0:22:04 Mice I like because mice are honest.
0:22:06 Mice don’t like you.
0:22:08 They’re never gonna like you.
0:22:09 Rats like you.
0:22:11 You pick one up and after a while,
0:22:13 they snuggle into you.
0:22:16 They’ll like snuggle in your armpit or your elbow
0:22:18 or they’ll get on your neck.
0:22:20 They’re sweet and they’re smart.
0:22:22 They make great pets, honestly.
0:22:24 – Okay, for the record, I’m looking here
0:22:25 at your author photo where you’re looking
0:22:28 like a regular human, right?
0:22:30 Dressed nicely, standing in a nice place,
0:22:33 but then you’ve got this rat kind of curled,
0:22:35 not even curled up, like luxuriating
0:22:37 in the crook of your arm.
0:22:39 – Yeah, that’s magrat is her name.
0:22:42 And she is not mine.
0:22:43 And sadly, she has since passed away
0:22:45 because rats don’t live very long,
0:22:48 but she was a wonderful model.
0:22:50 She did not pee on me the entire time.
0:22:51 I was shocked.
0:22:56 – This kind of affection toward the rat,
0:22:59 expressed here by Brookshire and earlier
0:23:02 by Julia Zichello, would seem to be rare.
0:23:06 Anti-rat sentiment is widespread and it is vocal.
0:23:09 Let’s not forget, New York Mayor Eric Adams
0:23:12 calls rats public enemy number one.
0:23:14 But there are other voices out there
0:23:16 and other sentiments.
0:23:19 A researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands
0:23:22 named Koon Boomer published a paper called
0:23:24 Catching the Rat, in which he examines
0:23:27 the portrayal of rats in 20th century novels,
0:23:30 movies, comics, and more.
0:23:32 In this analysis, Boomer found an extraordinarily
0:23:36 diverse spectrum of human rat relations.
0:23:38 He argues that for many people,
0:23:42 rats are no longer seen chiefly as villains.
0:23:44 And here’s Bethany Brookshire again.
0:23:46 – I absolutely think the way we see animals
0:23:49 in media can strongly affect our perception.
0:23:53 I’ve been able to learn from my own research
0:23:56 that rats are absolutely not public enemy
0:23:57 number one everywhere.
0:23:59 – You may remember the story that Brookshire told us
0:24:02 in part one of this series about the temple in India
0:24:04 where rats are worshiped.
0:24:09 – They don’t have to be the villain that we see them as.
0:24:10 They could be something else.
0:24:15 And the good news is that humans can change their minds.
0:24:16 We do it all the time.
0:24:17 So we could do it with rats too.
0:24:21 I love the movie Ratatouille.
0:24:25 I love that movie ’cause not only do I like rats,
0:24:26 I love food.
0:24:29 I’ve never yet been able to make that picture perfect
0:24:31 Ratatouille that Remy makes.
0:24:33 It never looks that good.
0:24:37 – Coming up, we go back to Jan Pinkova
0:24:41 to find out the real mission of the film Ratatouille.
0:24:43 – Really to help us get along with each other.
0:24:44 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:24:46 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:24:47 We’ll be right back.
0:25:05 – When the film Ratatouille was released in 2007,
0:25:09 the New York Times critic Ayo Scott described it like this,
0:25:12 a nearly flawless piece of popular art
0:25:14 as well as one of the most persuasive portraits
0:25:17 of an artist ever committed to film.
0:25:20 The screenwriter and director was Brad Bird,
0:25:22 who a few years earlier had made The Incredibles.
0:25:25 Bird was also one of three people credited
0:25:26 with original story.
0:25:29 The other two were Jim Capobianco
0:25:33 and the man we met earlier, Jan Pinkova.
0:25:35 – I came up with the original idea
0:25:38 and wrote a treatment, came up with the name Ratatouille
0:25:40 and the basic bones and outlines
0:25:42 of the concept and the story.
0:25:45 And then co-wrote a script with Jim Capobianco
0:25:47 and there were many versions of the script
0:25:50 with various people on the way, as is always the case.
0:25:53 And we began developing the movie.
0:25:56 – Pinkova was born in what was then Czechoslovakia.
0:25:58 But after the Soviet invasion of 1968,
0:26:00 his family moved to England.
0:26:01 He was six years old.
0:26:04 He was interested in film from early on.
0:26:07 When he was 12, he got an eight millimeter camera
0:26:08 for Christmas.
0:26:11 He won a national competition for young filmmakers
0:26:13 run by the BBC.
0:26:16 He was good at finding ideas in unusual places.
0:26:20 For instance, watching his grandfather play chess
0:26:22 by himself.
0:26:24 – His name was Tony Antonin.
0:26:26 And he was a very serious man.
0:26:28 He was the first of 10 children,
0:26:30 the son of a village cobbler.
0:26:32 And he had perfect grades at school.
0:26:35 He was an engineer who designed
0:26:38 railway engine braking systems.
0:26:40 He was a man who had a hard life.
0:26:42 When he did something, he did it seriously.
0:26:44 So when he played chess,
0:26:48 he would take as long as it took to make the next move.
0:26:50 And that’s how he won a lot of games
0:26:52 by boring the other side to death.
0:26:53 But when he was playing with himself,
0:26:55 he would just stare at the board
0:26:57 and just keep on thinking and thinking
0:26:59 and thinking as far and deeply as he could
0:27:01 until he could make the move.
0:27:04 He wanted, and then he turned the board around.
0:27:08 And then he did it again and yeah, it took a while.
0:27:11 – Jan Pinkova studied computer science as an undergraduate
0:27:13 and he got a PhD in robotics.
0:27:17 This led to a career as a computer animator.
0:27:21 And in 1993, he landed a job at Pixar.
0:27:23 They were then starting pre-production on Toy Story
0:27:27 and Pinkova was assigned to the commercials group.
0:27:30 After a few years, he made an animated short
0:27:33 called Jerry’s Game about an old man
0:27:35 who plays chess against himself.
0:27:39 Jerry’s Game earned Pinkova an Academy Award
0:27:41 and a chance to pitch a feature film
0:27:44 to the Pixar brain trust.
0:27:46 – I’m pitching to John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton
0:27:49 and Pete Docter and Joe Ranff, the head of Story
0:27:52 and Ed Catmull, the head of the studio.
0:27:55 These are just the early concepts for a film.
0:27:58 One of the ideas was, oh, this is a story
0:28:00 about a rat who wants to become a chef.
0:28:03 Everyone laughs, everyone gets it.
0:28:04 You’re sold.
0:28:06 – The idea had come to him at home
0:28:08 while he and his wife were in the kitchen.
0:28:11 – You know, how can a rat become a chef?
0:28:13 You can immediately see the central problem
0:28:15 of the story right there.
0:28:18 It is obviously a disaster
0:28:21 and it’s gonna be funny if you can make it work.
0:28:25 – But the making it work part would be difficult.
0:28:27 – We were developing this film for quite a while.
0:28:29 You’re working on story.
0:28:31 You’re working on designs, characters,
0:28:33 scenes, environments and so on.
0:28:37 We did several versions of the story reel.
0:28:41 Story reel is drawings edited with sound and music
0:28:44 to basically be a movie you can watch
0:28:45 in the form of drawings.
0:28:48 That’s how an animated film is prototyped.
0:28:51 It’s a way of making the movie before you’ve made the movie
0:28:56 because in animation, you do not want to cut animation out.
0:29:01 – Just because it’s so time intensive and expensive, yes?
0:29:04 – Yeah, and because you’re creating everything,
0:29:08 you’re making a whole world come to life artificially.
0:29:11 Every blade of grass, every gesture of the character,
0:29:13 somebody has put a lot of work into it.
0:29:15 This film had a longer gestation period.
0:29:18 By the time it was made, it was six years into it.
0:29:19 – So what happened then?
0:29:21 I mean, I know the end of the story,
0:29:23 but just give me the shortish version
0:29:25 of what happened over the next couple of years
0:29:28 between the full prototype, let’s say,
0:29:29 and the film being released.
0:29:32 – We worked on it, had a bunch of versions.
0:29:34 In making a movie like that, it goes up and down,
0:29:36 you’re continually changing.
0:29:39 One of the wonderful things that everyone should remember
0:29:41 and understand is that Pixar didn’t happen
0:29:43 because of computer graphics.
0:29:46 Pixar happened because of story.
0:29:48 At least half the effort on any one of these movies,
0:29:51 at least half is story, story, story, story,
0:29:53 and making sure that the thing that’s being made
0:29:56 is an appealing, engaging story with characters
0:29:59 that you care about that really make sense to an audience.
0:30:02 We’ve got into the character development
0:30:04 and the designs and the environments,
0:30:05 the kitchen being in Paris and so on.
0:30:09 And it involved also some fabulous experiences of research.
0:30:11 That’s a thing that Pixar was famous for,
0:30:14 getting in-depth research to feed the process
0:30:16 of making the movie authentic.
0:30:18 We ended up going twice to Paris to dine
0:30:21 in the finest restaurants and meet with the chefs.
0:30:23 The artist has to suffer, right?
0:30:25 So you have to do your work.
0:30:27 – Was there rat research as well?
0:30:28 – Yeah, there was rat research.
0:30:31 – Was that something that you were personally involved in
0:30:33 or were you having researchers feed you information?
0:30:35 And what was the information?
0:30:38 Was it the biology, the history, the personality of rats?
0:30:40 – We spoke to a bunch of people
0:30:43 with different attitudes to rats, for instance.
0:30:45 I remember the national president of the Rat Fancy
0:30:47 as Association of the United States,
0:30:50 the people who like to keep rats as pets.
0:30:51 She was wonderful.
0:30:53 She was really insightful and knowledgeable
0:30:57 about who rats are as characters, real rats.
0:30:59 One of the lovely things she told us was,
0:31:02 there’s the old cliche that dogs look up to you
0:31:05 and cats look down on you.
0:31:07 If you have a rat as a pet,
0:31:09 that’s a peer-to-peer relationship.
0:31:10 A rat looks you in the eye
0:31:13 and doesn’t feel inferior or superior.
0:31:15 It’s just, you are like me.
0:31:16 I’m like you.
0:31:17 – That’s so interesting.
0:31:19 Do you believe that to be true?
0:31:24 – I, you know, she certainly has that expertise.
0:31:27 One of the things that makes it believable to me
0:31:32 is that in the history of organized human life,
0:31:35 rats have been right there with us all along, you know.
0:31:37 – What else did you learn about rats?
0:31:40 – Biologically, they have some interesting traits
0:31:42 like rats are incontinent.
0:31:45 They don’t know when to not do it.
0:31:48 That’s just being a rat, right?
0:31:50 You poop and pee whenever.
0:31:52 So actually keeping a real rat on your head
0:31:54 would not be such a good idea.
0:31:58 – Okay, and that was a piece of real rat biology
0:32:00 you chose to not include in the film.
0:32:03 – And no, no, I didn’t seem to have a good story point there
0:32:05 for our main character, the guy in the kitchen
0:32:08 doing the cooking to be doing that too much.
0:32:11 – What’s it like to see a film like this
0:32:14 have such great success knowing that you gave birth to it
0:32:16 and you raised it, but weren’t around to,
0:32:19 let’s say, see it graduate.
0:32:20 – I was around a long part of the way,
0:32:22 not right to the very end,
0:32:25 and that’s normal for the film industry.
0:32:27 I was a first time feature director
0:32:30 coming up with an idea and getting it made,
0:32:33 which in the grand scheme of things is a pretty great result.
0:32:36 And I have tremendous respect for Brad,
0:32:38 but as a writer and director.
0:32:40 And he took great pains when it was time
0:32:42 to take over to talk to me and the crew
0:32:44 and especially to sit down and listen
0:32:46 to what my intentions had been,
0:32:49 making the story and what I was hoping for
0:32:52 and to really understand where the whole thing came from
0:32:55 and what it meant so that he could then take it his way,
0:32:57 which you have to do as a director.
0:33:00 So overall, I’m really very happy and grateful
0:33:03 that it turned out to be such a successful movie.
0:33:07 – Pink of a left Pixar soon after
0:33:11 and he worked on a few other features and shorts,
0:33:14 but none have achieved as much acclaim or prestige
0:33:18 as Ratatouille or the other projects he worked on at Pixar.
0:33:21 And where is Jan Pinkova today?
0:33:23 – I’m now here in Germany of all places
0:33:26 at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg
0:33:28 in the Animation Institute.
0:33:30 – What is the primary mission?
0:33:31 Is it education?
0:33:32 Is it outreach?
0:33:34 – It’s filmmaking.
0:33:36 It’s very much learning by doing it.
0:33:38 It’s about let’s make movies
0:33:41 and fail miserably sometimes and succeed wonderfully sometimes.
0:33:44 There’s very little sitting and cogitating
0:33:46 and theorizing and philosophizing.
0:33:49 It’s about practical doing and a lot about working together
0:33:51 ’cause the bigger the project,
0:33:54 the more of a team sport filmmaking is.
0:33:57 – This reminds me of hearing Werner Herzog talk
0:34:00 not that long ago about when he was in film school.
0:34:02 And mostly he just stole cameras
0:34:04 from school and went out and shot.
0:34:05 – Yeah, yeah, he did.
0:34:07 If you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it.
0:34:09 You’ll figure out a way somehow.
0:34:12 I’ve heard you speak about the mission of filmmaking
0:34:13 and storytelling generally,
0:34:16 which is to give people not just an opportunity
0:34:18 to be engaged and entertained,
0:34:21 but an opportunity to change their perspective on something.
0:34:24 When you began thinking about and writing Ratatouille,
0:34:28 what perspective were you thinking about changing?
0:34:30 – Really to help us get along with each other.
0:34:34 There are lots of beautiful examples of stories like this.
0:34:35 Billy Elliot, for instance,
0:34:40 that’s about a minor son in 1980s strike-ridden Northern England
0:34:43 who has to figure out how to be a ballet dancer,
0:34:44 which is the most unmanly thing
0:34:47 he can possibly be doing in the middle of this.
0:34:50 So in a way, Ratatouille is like ballet dancing with Nazis.
0:34:52 We’re not only doing the thing you’re not supposed to be doing,
0:34:54 you’re doing it with people who are ready to kill you
0:34:55 as soon as they see you.
0:34:59 I was immediately drawn to the character of Remy
0:35:02 as stuck between these two worlds.
0:35:05 He’s going somewhere where he cannot possibly be.
0:35:08 The kitchen where everyone just from the get-go
0:35:10 hates him, will kill him.
0:35:14 And on the other side, he’s betraying his people, his family.
0:35:15 He wants to work with the enemy,
0:35:18 with the people who will kill us if they see us.
0:35:21 So he’s stuck there on his own.
0:35:24 Ratatouille is an idea, as a story, it’s an allegory.
0:35:25 What’s it about really?
0:35:29 It’s not about rats and cooking, it’s about prejudice.
0:35:33 It’s about overcoming the limitations imposed on you
0:35:38 by misrepresentation, by misunderstanding.
0:35:41 It’s about racism, sexism, everything,
0:35:43 all those different forms of prejudice
0:35:46 in the form of a rat cooking story.
0:35:49 I didn’t think about the Nazis
0:35:52 until the scenes well along in the film
0:35:55 after Remy gets reunited with his family
0:35:57 and his rat tribe in the sewers.
0:36:00 And then later, he gets lost on the streets of Paris
0:36:03 and he runs into some humans who plainly hate rats.
0:36:04 They scream when they see him.
0:36:06 They literally kick him to the curb
0:36:09 and he’s made to feel disgusting, dirty, worthless,
0:36:11 et cetera, et cetera.
0:36:15 That was the first time that the allegory really hit me.
0:36:17 I’m curious, when you grow up in Europe, as you did,
0:36:20 you have a different relationship to the war plainly
0:36:22 than Americans do and a different relationship
0:36:23 to Germany and Nazism.
0:36:25 It’s interesting that you’re now living in Germany,
0:36:26 obviously, so much has changed.
0:36:31 But I am curious about the way Remy in that moment
0:36:34 was seen as an outcast, as dirty, as ruinous.
0:36:38 – Well, it’s always been a slur to call someone a rat.
0:36:42 That’s an epithet that’s used to paint them as the other,
0:36:45 the thing that you should hate and kill and push away.
0:36:47 Any story that sees the world
0:36:51 from the perspective of the shunned and the hated,
0:36:53 hopefully gives us an opportunity
0:36:56 to open up our feelings for each other.
0:36:59 – And Remy tries to convince his father
0:37:01 that the course of events can change.
0:37:02 The course of events, in this case,
0:37:05 being rat relations with humans.
0:37:06 In your film, it’s hard to say
0:37:08 whether the rats hate the humans more,
0:37:10 the humans hate the rats more.
0:37:11 It’s intense on both sides.
0:37:14 And the father argues that, you know,
0:37:16 son, nature is nature.
0:37:18 What were you going for there?
0:37:21 – Well, Django, the father, he has a point, right?
0:37:24 Everything the world tells him is he’s right.
0:37:26 There’s no arguing against him.
0:37:26 Remy gets it.
0:37:30 And you hope that the whole thing adds up to that moment
0:37:34 when Remy finally has to come out,
0:37:37 reveal himself as the cooking rat,
0:37:41 step off that ledge with no one to catch him,
0:37:44 and take that ultimate risk with the risk of his own life.
0:37:47 It’s a real crisis, so life or death choice.
0:37:49 And he chooses to be himself.
0:37:52 And hopefully the story adds up to that feeling
0:37:54 with the audience going,
0:37:55 “What will happen?
0:37:56 How will this go?”
0:37:59 Because your job as a story writer
0:38:01 is to get to that ending
0:38:04 that really has to happen in the movie.
0:38:05 There’s only one way to end it.
0:38:08 He has to find a way to be himself.
0:38:11 – Was your original ending, even if just in your head,
0:38:14 as happy an ending as the film ultimately had?
0:38:16 – Yeah, he ends up being able to cook.
0:38:17 That was always gonna happen.
0:38:19 – And interacting with humans.
0:38:21 – Yeah, because there are some humans
0:38:22 that he can interact with.
0:38:24 The humans who care about cooking
0:38:26 and who don’t care who’s doing the cooking
0:38:28 because they recognize genius when they see it.
0:38:32 What I do love is this dramatized contrast
0:38:35 of the world’s attitudes to cooking in rats
0:38:37 in one with Ego the critic.
0:38:40 Brad did a fantastic thing of casting Petro Tool,
0:38:41 which was one of his last roles
0:38:43 and really a beautiful performance.
0:38:46 And this whole zoom in to his childhood
0:38:48 when he tastes the ratatouille.
0:38:53 And suddenly this cold, cadaverous, disappointed critic
0:38:57 whose entire career has been being judgmental.
0:39:01 He’s returned to his early childhood
0:39:04 in just one moment and we feel for him.
0:39:07 – In that moment, it will remind many of us
0:39:10 of that Proustian rush when Proust eats the Madeleine
0:39:15 and his entire childhood life philosophy comes.
0:39:19 It all comes rushing back to him
0:39:24 and provokes this unbelievable examination of his own life.
0:39:29 In your case, when Anton Ego tastes the ratatouille
0:39:32 and has this reverie and trip back
0:39:34 to a very different place in time for him,
0:39:38 in that case, is the ratatouille the food itself
0:39:40 an allegory as well or is it just food?
0:39:42 – It’s love, isn’t it?
0:39:43 – Mm. (laughs)
0:39:46 – The scene, if you remember, he’s fallen off his bike
0:39:49 and he’s a kid, he’s been crying, he’s had a bad time.
0:39:54 And his mother serves him this simple peasant dish
0:39:57 and through that shows her love for him.
0:39:58 It’s love.
0:40:09 So, the restaurant critic loves the ratatouille.
0:40:12 The rat loves to cook.
0:40:14 And Jan Pinkova loves to tell stories
0:40:16 about the human condition,
0:40:20 sometimes in the form of an animated rat.
0:40:22 I asked him if he thinks ratatouille
0:40:25 may have shifted the public’s perception of rats.
0:40:29 – I hope it opens a door to just thinking differently
0:40:32 about a species that you might otherwise just dismiss
0:40:34 as a category.
0:40:36 People wanna put rats on their head in their imagination.
0:40:37 That’s something, right?
0:40:40 That’s a door opening to another way of thinking.
0:40:43 – I often wonder whether the demonization of the rat
0:40:46 is a little bit random and/or driven
0:40:49 by earlier pop culture references
0:40:51 because I think about the mouse.
0:40:53 We had Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse,
0:40:58 whereas rats, we had Templeton from Charlotte’s Web,
0:41:00 voiced by Paul Lynn, who is sinister.
0:41:02 We had the film Willard.
0:41:04 Rats are never the heroes.
0:41:08 – Look, you put a mouse next to a rat and you go,
0:41:10 okay, who’s the bad guy?
0:41:13 It’s a fairly easy choice because
0:41:14 the rat’s bigger, it’s scruffier,
0:41:16 it’s got a longer nose,
0:41:19 and it has that slightly disturbing bald tail.
0:41:21 – But these are all cosmetic differences.
0:41:22 – They are, they are.
0:41:24 – None of them are about the soul or the mood
0:41:26 or the abilities.
0:41:27 – They are.
0:41:29 Now, what is wrong with us that we judge by appearances?
0:41:32 – That’s a big question, isn’t it, Jan?
0:41:33 – Yeah.
0:41:36 – I mean, do you have any solutions for that?
0:41:37 – Exposure.
0:41:40 You gotta see the thing that you judge
0:41:44 as other early in life as just there, and it’s okay.
0:41:49 – And what’s your personal feeling today about rats?
0:41:53 – I think rats are a part of our life
0:41:55 that we need to get used to.
0:41:57 They are creatures in the world
0:41:58 that have every right to be here.
0:42:02 – Okay, we have to remind ourselves
0:42:05 that Jan Pinkova’s view of the rat,
0:42:09 despite all his research, is a fictional rat.
0:42:11 Remy is a chef, after all,
0:42:13 and none of the rats in Ratatouille
0:42:16 seem bound by the rat’s real lifespan
0:42:18 of just two or three years.
0:42:22 But is Pinkova’s view of the rat any less realistic
0:42:25 than New York Mayor Eric Adams’ view?
0:42:28 He seems to see the rat as intentionally evil
0:42:33 rather than as just another animal hustling to survive,
0:42:38 much like New Yorkers hustle to survive and thrive.
0:42:41 Neither of those views is very realistic.
0:42:44 So what is a realistic view?
0:42:48 Having now made these three episodes,
0:42:49 I would put it this way.
0:42:53 The rat is the animal no one loves until they do.
0:42:59 So what’s your view of the rat?
0:43:01 Let us know what you think about this series,
0:43:04 “Sympathy for the Rat” or any of our episodes.
0:43:08 You can reach us at radio@freakonomics.com.
0:43:11 Big thanks to Jan Pinkova and everyone else
0:43:12 who helped tell this story.
0:43:16 Bethany Brookshire, Kathy Karate, Bobby Corrigan, Ed Glazer,
0:43:19 Neal Stenseth, Robert Sullivan, Jessica Tish,
0:43:21 Karen Wickerson and Julia Zichello.
0:43:27 Coming up next time on the show.
0:43:30 If you tally up our wins and losses,
0:43:32 we have done better than prior administrations,
0:43:34 even while taking bigger shots
0:43:37 and putting together more ambitious cases.
0:43:40 Lena Khan was just 32 years old
0:43:41 when Joe Biden appointed her
0:43:43 to lead the Federal Trade Commission.
0:43:45 With Donald Trump back in the White House,
0:43:49 Khan is gone, but Trump has let stand
0:43:51 one of Khan’s signature achievements,
0:43:53 an updated set of merger guidelines
0:43:57 that is designed to modernize antitrust.
0:43:59 Why would a new administration
0:44:02 that seems to be reversing everything from the old one
0:44:04 want to keep those guidelines?
0:44:06 We’ll find out next time on the show.
0:44:08 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:44:11 And if you can, someone else too.
0:44:14 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:44:18 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app.
0:44:20 It’s also at Freakonomics.com
0:44:22 where we publish transcripts and show notes.
0:44:25 This series was produced by Zak Lepinski
0:44:27 with help from Dalvin Aboulagi.
0:44:29 The Freakonomics Radio network staff
0:44:31 also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman,
0:44:33 Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman,
0:44:35 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth,
0:44:36 Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger,
0:44:38 Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarrs,
0:44:42 Morgan Levy, Neil Coruth, Sarah Lilly, and Theo Jacobs.
0:44:44 Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune”
0:44:48 by the Hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:44:50 As always, thank you for listening.
0:44:56 Can I say I’m not a snob?
0:45:00 I think if you say that, that means you are.
0:45:02 Yeah, that was bad. Can you cut that out for me?
0:45:07 (telephone ringing)
0:45:10 The Freakonomics Radio Network,
0:45:11 the hidden side of everything.
0:45:15 (upbeat music)
0:45:16 Stitcher.
0:45:18 you
0:45:20 you
0:00:06 – Are you a chef?
0:00:08 Are you a home cook?
0:00:09 – I can cook.
0:00:10 (laughing)
0:00:12 – He says reluctantly.
0:00:15 – I sometimes cook well, not always.
0:00:17 – Do you happen to make a nicer ratatouille?
0:00:19 – Yeah, I’ve made ratatouille before,
0:00:21 but I don’t have the skill, taste, and feeling
0:00:23 to make a great ratatouille.
0:00:26 The thing is, it’s just a bunch of vegetables, right?
0:00:27 – Well, yes, but no.
0:00:28 – Yes, but no, exactly.
0:00:31 And that’s the thing, ratatouille is a theme
0:00:33 and a title for the film.
0:00:36 That was there from the beginning for a number of reasons.
0:00:39 First of all, it’s about rats, and ratatouille,
0:00:41 it tells you it’s a comedy ’cause it’s a silly word,
0:00:46 and ratatouille is the quintessential peasant dish.
0:00:50 It’s just vegetables, it’s stuff that you can find easily.
0:00:53 If you know how to cook it well, it’s beautiful.
0:00:57 – I’m speaking here with Jan Pinkover.
0:01:01 I worked on a couple of the early feature films of Pixar,
0:01:06 including A Bug’s Life and Monsters Inc and Toy Story 2,
0:01:10 and I got a break to develop my own feature film.
0:01:14 – That feature film was ratatouille.
0:01:15 It’s about a rat named Remi,
0:01:18 who lives in a farmhouse in the French countryside
0:01:20 and dreams of becoming a chef.
0:01:25 – You found cheese, and not just any cheese,
0:01:27 it’s home to Chevron to pay.
0:01:30 That would go beautifully with my mushroom.
0:01:34 – But then, Remi, his family, and his entire rat tribe
0:01:36 are chased into exile,
0:01:38 and he winds up in the sewers of Paris.
0:01:40 As he explores the city above ground,
0:01:44 Remi comes across the legendary Gusteau’s Restaurant.
0:01:47 The late chef Auguste Gusteau was Remi’s hero.
0:01:51 His famous book is called Anyone Can Cook.
0:01:54 But Remi sees that Gusteau’s restaurant is now run
0:01:58 by a corrupt tyrannical chef,
0:02:00 and there’s a new garbage boy in the kitchen
0:02:01 named Linguini.
0:02:07 – Garbage boy, you are cooking.
0:02:11 Out there, you’re cooking my kitchen.
0:02:15 – Linguini does want to cook, but he doesn’t have much talent.
0:02:19 Remi has talent, but he’s a rat.
0:02:21 So the two of them become secret collaborators.
0:02:25 One look, and I knew we had the same crazy idea.
0:02:31 – Remi hides on top of Linguini’s head
0:02:33 under his chef’s toque,
0:02:36 and becomes his puppet master chef.
0:02:39 Together, they make beautiful food, potato leek soup,
0:02:41 the perfect French omelet,
0:02:45 and a twist on sweet bread’s à la Gusteau.
0:02:49 It turns out that Linguini is the son of the great Gusteau,
0:02:52 and the secret collaboration between Linguini and Remi
0:02:57 turns out to be a big hit, as was the film itself.
0:02:59 Ratatouille, released in 2007,
0:03:02 won the Oscar for best animated feature,
0:03:05 and it grossed over half a billion dollars.
0:03:08 That made Ratatouille a big outlier in Hollywood,
0:03:12 and Remi the rat was an outlier too.
0:03:14 As we’ve been learning in this series on rats,
0:03:18 it is a rare day when a rat is the hero of any story.
0:03:21 Since the days of the bubonic plague,
0:03:24 rats have been associated with death and disease.
0:03:28 To call someone a rat is a special kind of insult.
0:03:32 It suggests they’ve behaved so badly as to be subhuman.
0:03:37 But is it time to reassess the rat’s reputation,
0:03:39 perhaps even rehabilitate it?
0:03:41 Today, on Freakinomics Radio,
0:03:45 we dissect Ratatouille with Jan Pinkova.
0:03:48 – In a way, Ratatouille is like ballet dancing with Nazis.
0:03:52 We look at why rats have been so valuable to human science.
0:03:55 – Like, right all the way down to DNA.
0:03:57 – And we hear a love story.
0:04:00 – Not to say anything negative about the hamsters of the world,
0:04:03 but I think it’s a different relationship.
0:04:05 – Come along for this third and final episode
0:04:09 in our series, “Sympathy for the Rat.”
0:04:11 (upbeat music)
0:04:14 (jazz music)
0:04:22 – This is Freakinomics Radio,
0:04:25 the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything
0:04:28 with your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:04:30 (upbeat music)
0:04:41 – We humans really love some animals,
0:04:44 two-thirds of American households have at least one pet,
0:04:45 most of them dogs or cats.
0:04:48 We often treat them like members of the family.
0:04:52 When we hear about an animal being mistreated or killed,
0:04:54 the outcry can be as loud as if it happened
0:04:57 to a fellow human, if not louder.
0:05:02 And yet, in 2022, when New York City Mayor Eric Adams
0:05:06 declared war on rats and appointed a rat czar
0:05:10 to get rid of them, there was almost no outcry.
0:05:13 The rat seems to have crossed some invisible border
0:05:17 from animal to pest, even menace.
0:05:19 But it wasn’t always thus.
0:05:21 – The first rats that were domesticated,
0:05:24 they were pets in Victorian England
0:05:26 and they were not thought of as negatively
0:05:29 as we think about even pet rats today.
0:05:33 So it was revered to have a rat on your shoulder.
0:05:34 – This is Julia Zichello.
0:05:37 She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan
0:05:40 and is an evolutionary biologist at Hunter College.
0:05:44 But her rat experience is not just academic.
0:05:47 – During the pandemic, I got a car for the first time
0:05:50 because alternate side of the street parking was relaxed.
0:05:52 I kept it in one place for too long.
0:05:55 I also don’t really drive that often.
0:05:58 So yeah, so when I went to start it, it didn’t start.
0:06:01 And I had to get a toad and the mechanic told me
0:06:04 that there was a bedding in there connected with rats
0:06:06 and also orange peels.
0:06:07 – This was in the engine?
0:06:09 – This was in the engine.
0:06:11 It was the late fall, early winter,
0:06:12 which is just the time that they would be
0:06:14 looking for a warm place.
0:06:16 I thought it was really funny at first
0:06:19 before I got the bill from the mechanic.
0:06:22 – What did it look like inside the engine?
0:06:23 – The wires were gnawed.
0:06:26 You can see shards or pieces of the wire
0:06:29 and then the orange peels and some dry leaves
0:06:32 and other things that they were using for nesting material.
0:06:34 – I know that rats are extraordinarily fertile.
0:06:36 They have really short gestation.
0:06:37 They have a lot of pups.
0:06:39 Do you know if maybe your car was also
0:06:41 a rat baby hospital as well?
0:06:43 – I don’t know, but it may have been,
0:06:44 which is, you know, kind of cute.
0:06:51 – Zkello had never thought deeply about rats
0:06:53 until they moved into her car.
0:06:56 And even then, her attitude was relaxed.
0:06:58 She wasn’t strongly anti-rat,
0:07:01 nor did she find a reason to become pro-rat.
0:07:04 But soon after the car incident, things changed.
0:07:05 – Yeah.
0:07:08 So I inherited rats from a family member
0:07:11 who moved to a building that could no longer have pets.
0:07:15 The rats were already, I believe, 18 months old.
0:07:17 I felt the same way most people would feel.
0:07:19 They’re like, oh, no way kind of thing.
0:07:20 Like, oh my gosh, their tails.
0:07:23 Everyone’s so upset about their tails
0:07:24 because they’re so gross.
0:07:28 But, you know, then I warmed to them over time.
0:07:30 Eventually, because you’re feeding it,
0:07:32 because it’s a little bit lovely,
0:07:34 then you end up feeling some warmth towards it.
0:07:37 – What kind of rats were your pet rats?
0:07:38 – They were two different breeds.
0:07:41 One was agouti, and that was sort of silver-colored.
0:07:43 The other was a hooded rat,
0:07:45 which was white with just a little bit of black
0:07:47 on their head and striped down their back.
0:07:49 – Can I have some names, please?
0:07:52 – One was named Sylvie, and the other was Pele.
0:07:53 They were both males.
0:07:56 – So you didn’t have any breeding, obviously.
0:07:58 – Correct, no offspring.
0:08:00 You know, they were fun to watch.
0:08:02 They were interactive.
0:08:04 They eat a lot of different things.
0:08:09 We had some fun feeding them the circular corn chips.
0:08:10 They would take the corn chip
0:08:12 like you would a steering wheel of a car
0:08:16 and turn it around and eat it around the edges.
0:08:18 One thing I noticed about the two pet rats
0:08:20 is that they had different personalities
0:08:21 from one another.
0:08:22 Sylvie was much more bold,
0:08:25 and Pele was much more cryptic.
0:08:27 They ate food in different ways.
0:08:29 Pele would take the food and go into this little hidey box,
0:08:33 and Sylvie would just unabashedly eat the food
0:08:34 out there in front of you.
0:08:36 – Do they vocalize?
0:08:37 – They did, not a lot.
0:08:39 Technically, rats do vocalize.
0:08:41 – It was only when they were socializing with each other
0:08:43 would they vocalize when they were hanging with you?
0:08:45 – Only when we were socializing with each other.
0:08:47 They were not super vocal that I heard.
0:08:49 And I think there are sounds we can hear.
0:08:52 – Can you imitate the sounds that you did hear?
0:08:55 – I don’t know about that.
0:08:58 Is it like a squeaking kind of thing?
0:09:01 – Yes, very, very light squeaking.
0:09:03 Not like long vocalizations.
0:09:05 They were not singing.
0:09:07 There’s been some research showing that rats can laugh
0:09:08 when they’re tickled.
0:09:11 Those are things that you can’t hear with the human ear,
0:09:12 though there were special recordings
0:09:14 that were showing that.
0:09:16 – Here’s what those special recordings sound like.
0:09:24 – They also were very responsive to all of the sounds
0:09:26 in the environment, in the apartment,
0:09:28 things like the coffee grinder.
0:09:29 I was noticing that the hooded rat
0:09:32 was really stressed out when I was grinding coffee.
0:09:33 – So what would you do about that?
0:09:35 – I mean, I couldn’t do anything.
0:09:37 I had no room to move them
0:09:39 and I couldn’t stop drinking coffee.
0:09:41 – Did you take your grinder into the bathroom
0:09:43 or a closet or something?
0:09:44 – No, no.
0:09:48 I just noted it and continued on with the grinding.
0:09:51 You know, their sensory systems are so acute.
0:09:52 Obviously, their olfaction,
0:09:54 their sense of smell is really good.
0:09:55 Their hearing is really good
0:09:58 and they seem very sensitive to things in their environment.
0:10:03 It did also make me think about the rats in New York City.
0:10:04 There aren’t a lot of studies
0:10:07 about the behavior of wild rats
0:10:10 from the perspective of the rats.
0:10:11 One of the things I thought about
0:10:14 after having the pet rats is that I wonder
0:10:17 if the rats in New York City are very, very stressed.
0:10:19 They like to be underground.
0:10:21 When you see them skittering across the sidewalk,
0:10:23 it stresses you out,
0:10:26 but I’m pretty sure that they’re also highly stressed.
0:10:29 – Is it possible that one partial solution
0:10:32 to the infestation of wild rats in a city like New York
0:10:36 would be the widespread embrace of pet rats?
0:10:39 – I don’t know about the widespread embrace of pet rats,
0:10:42 but I think the rats are in New York.
0:10:44 I think that she should have a pet rat.
0:10:47 If you want to control them or if you want to love them,
0:10:49 you have to know about them.
0:10:51 (gentle music)
0:10:54 (gentle music)
0:10:56 I first came across Julia Zichello
0:10:57 when I read a piece she wrote
0:11:01 for a hyper-local news site called The West Side Rag.
0:11:04 If you live on the Upper West Side and don’t read The Rag,
0:11:06 well, I don’t even know what to say.
0:11:10 Here is the first line of Zichello’s piece.
0:11:13 Almost a year has passed and I can finally write about it.
0:11:16 – So they both passed away, sadly.
0:11:18 One of the things that happened towards the end of their life,
0:11:21 which also is something that’s relevant to all rats,
0:11:23 is that they aged so quickly
0:11:26 and they started to show signs of aging,
0:11:29 like being hunched over, losing body fat.
0:11:32 One month in a rat’s life is equal to three years
0:11:34 in human years.
0:11:36 People know this because there’s a lot of people,
0:11:37 obviously who use rats in the lab,
0:11:41 trying to study aging and trying to make that equivalent.
0:11:43 So they aged very rapidly.
0:11:46 We don’t really exactly know why they died.
0:11:49 They didn’t show any signs of disease that we could see,
0:11:52 but one of the things that happened that was very sad
0:11:54 is that Sylvie died first
0:11:57 and then for Pele, he was alone.
0:12:01 So we bought him a little toy that was the shape of a rat
0:12:03 because I knew that he would be lonely.
0:12:05 It was a cat toy.
0:12:07 He was not interested in the cat toy
0:12:09 and then he died less than a week later.
0:12:12 This is typical of rats because they’re so social
0:12:14 and they really like to have other rats around.
0:12:18 – So Pele died, you think of heartbreak, essentially?
0:12:19 – I think maybe, yeah.
0:12:22 We knew that the lifespan of domestic rats
0:12:25 is around two years and they were two and a half years old.
0:12:27 So, you know, they lived a good life.
0:12:30 We certainly appreciated them and learned a lot.
0:12:33 – I wanna read a couple sentences from the piece you wrote.
0:12:35 I regularly walk the Upper West Side
0:12:38 and spot swashbuckling rats at all hours,
0:12:41 but other times I find them squashed.
0:12:44 I don’t exactly feel sad about the dead rats,
0:12:46 but I also don’t feel nothing.
0:12:49 The dead rats make me think about life, death,
0:12:53 and somewhere stuffed between the pavement and the pellage.
0:12:56 I guess pellage is the fur of the rat, yes?
0:12:57 – Correct, yeah.
0:12:59 – There is something about love in there too.
0:13:02 Can you say more about that love?
0:13:06 – I will never see a squashed rat in New York City again
0:13:09 and not think about our pet rats.
0:13:10 I know that they are different.
0:13:13 The rats in the wild are more aggressive.
0:13:16 It wouldn’t be the same thing as the pet rats
0:13:17 that I experienced.
0:13:20 But I mean, of course you’d think about your pet.
0:13:22 – Are you going to replace them?
0:13:23 Maybe that’s unfair to say.
0:13:25 Are you going to get more rats?
0:13:27 – Definitely not.
0:13:29 I’m definitely not getting pet rats again.
0:13:30 – Because why?
0:13:31 – It’s too heartbreaking.
0:13:32 Their lifespan is too short
0:13:35 and the relationship between their charm
0:13:38 and their lifespan is too asymmetrical.
0:13:45 – Julia Zichello, as a scientist living in New York,
0:13:47 is by now familiar with what you might call
0:13:49 the three main categories of rat.
0:13:51 The wild ones who live on the streets,
0:13:54 the domesticated ones who live in your home,
0:13:59 and the rats that are bred to live and die in research labs.
0:14:02 – There are many studies across neuroscience
0:14:05 and pharmaceuticals and psychology
0:14:08 that used rats for decades.
0:14:10 The rats that are lab rats
0:14:14 are more genetically homogenous than wild rats.
0:14:18 Rats and humans shared a common ancestor 90 million years ago.
0:14:20 That’s not super close,
0:14:23 but it’s close enough to have revealed things
0:14:26 about the brain and behavior and genetics
0:14:29 that have ultimately helped humans.
0:14:31 So I wonder about how many people
0:14:32 have technically been helped by that
0:14:35 versus the number of people who have been harmed
0:14:38 by diseases they may have acquired from a rat.
0:14:40 – What was the common ancestor?
0:14:42 – The common ancestor was an animal
0:14:44 that lived in the late Cretaceous
0:14:47 around the time of the dinosaurs.
0:14:48 There’s not a specific name,
0:14:51 but we use genetics to understand
0:14:54 how far back these common ancestors lived.
0:14:57 The anatomy and behavior of that common ancestor
0:15:01 was much more rat-like than it is human-like.
0:15:03 They were likely nocturnal.
0:15:06 Some of them may have been insectivores,
0:15:07 and their basic anatomy
0:15:09 was much more rat-like than humans.
0:15:11 – For all the parallels there may be
0:15:13 between a rodent like a rat and humans,
0:15:18 one gigantic difference is fertility and lifespan.
0:15:21 Is that meaningful in any significant way to us?
0:15:25 – Yeah, so that makes rats good model organisms
0:15:27 because you can have many offspring
0:15:30 within your human life as a scientist studying them.
0:15:32 So you can see how things translate
0:15:34 from one generation to the next.
0:15:38 One rat female can have up to 72 pups per year.
0:15:41 And if we think about a rat pair,
0:15:43 so a male and a female,
0:15:45 and you think about them having offspring
0:15:47 and those offspring having offspring,
0:15:51 within one year there can be like 1,200 rats born
0:15:53 just from that pair.
0:15:55 From the perspective of controlling rats in the wild,
0:15:56 that’s a problem,
0:15:59 but from the perspective of using rats in the lab,
0:16:00 that’s a virtue.
0:16:05 – Coming up after the break,
0:16:08 what other virtues does the lab rat have?
0:16:10 – If you want an animal to press a lever
0:16:12 and receive a drug,
0:16:15 a rat is generally the better choice.
0:16:18 – And how did the rat become a lab animal in the first place?
0:16:19 I’m Stephen Dovner,
0:16:22 this is Freakonomics Radio, we’ll be right back.
0:16:34 In one recent year,
0:16:37 the market for laboratory rats in the US
0:16:39 was estimated at one and a half billion dollars.
0:16:42 And that number is expected to rise
0:16:45 as biomedical research keeps expanding.
0:16:48 The cost of a lab rat can range from around $25 a piece
0:16:50 to a few thousand dollars
0:16:54 for a specially bred or genetically engineered specimen.
0:16:56 But as many lab rats as there are,
0:17:00 they are outnumbered by lab mice.
0:17:01 – Oh, they’re cheaper, they’re smaller.
0:17:03 – That is Bethany Brookshire.
0:17:05 We heard from her in part one of this series,
0:17:08 she’s the author of a book called “Pests,
0:17:11 How Humans Create Animal Villains”.
0:17:14 – Especially now with the advent of CRISPR technologies
0:17:19 that allow us to alter adult genetics and fetal genetics.
0:17:21 We established that first in mice,
0:17:23 we can do it in rats now,
0:17:25 but it’s very, very well established in mice.
0:17:27 And so that really took off.
0:17:30 – Are there research projects or experiments
0:17:33 for which rats are prima facia better than mice?
0:17:34 – Yes. (laughs)
0:17:37 In my experience, rats are better
0:17:40 for self-administration of drugs.
0:17:44 So if you want an animal to press a lever and receive a drug,
0:17:48 a rat is generally the better choice because of size,
0:17:49 because mice are so small,
0:17:52 it’s really hard to make a lever that they can press.
0:17:54 Well. (laughs)
0:17:56 – I thought you were gonna say that mice,
0:17:58 their hands are too small to hold a joint
0:17:59 and that rats somehow.
0:18:01 – If you could teach them to roll joints,
0:18:04 I imagine that the mice would just roll a smaller one.
0:18:07 (gentle music)
0:18:08 Before she was a science writer,
0:18:10 Brookshire was a practicing scientist
0:18:12 at the Wake Forest School of Medicine,
0:18:16 where she got a PhD in physiology and pharmacology.
0:18:20 – I studied primarily drugs of abuse in graduate school
0:18:23 and then I studied antidepressants for my postdoc.
0:18:25 – What were some drugs that you were giving to mice and rats?
0:18:29 – Ritalin, cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy,
0:18:32 alcohol, Prozac.
0:18:34 If you wanna be really nerdy about it,
0:18:36 I studied the dopamine serotonodic interactions
0:18:37 in the ventral tegmental area,
0:18:40 nucleus accompaniment circuit of the mouse brain.
0:18:42 – That was gonna be my guess, but you know.
0:18:45 – Yeah, so I was interested in drugs
0:18:48 that primarily targeted dopaminergic systems.
0:18:50 – And what were you looking for?
0:18:54 – I was interested in chronic high dose administration
0:18:57 of methylphenidate, which is Ritalin.
0:19:01 Humans, we give people Ritalin starting at very young ages.
0:19:04 So I was very interested in what chronic exposure
0:19:08 to these drugs means for the brain as you get older.
0:19:13 Does it make you more or less susceptible to drug addiction?
0:19:14 – And what’d you learn?
0:19:16 – It’s tough to say.
0:19:20 I did show that in some animals,
0:19:24 you get tolerance to other drugs that are similar.
0:19:26 In some, you get sensitization.
0:19:29 So they’re more sensitive to the effects.
0:19:31 You also get transferral.
0:19:34 So different drugs that don’t necessarily
0:19:38 primarily hit that pathway will begin to hit that pathway.
0:19:41 – I’ve read that the mouse or rat model in research
0:19:44 can be really fruitful for certain kinds of research,
0:19:46 but unfruitful for others.
0:19:47 What can you tell me about that?
0:19:49 – I can say that, for example,
0:19:51 in the area where I was looking,
0:19:53 which is a group of structures
0:19:54 that we call the basal ganglia,
0:19:57 there’s a lot of similarity between basal ganglias
0:20:01 across all mammals, heck, across like reptiles.
0:20:03 It’s when you get into kind of higher order stuff
0:20:06 that things get more different.
0:20:08 Certainly there are drastic differences
0:20:10 in things like the immune system,
0:20:13 but I do strongly feel that rats and mice
0:20:16 are really essential to our understanding
0:20:18 of the human body and the human brain.
0:20:20 – What are the other things that make mice and rats
0:20:24 still really popular subjects of this kind of research?
0:20:28 Is it that they’re available, cheap, docile,
0:20:31 that they breed quickly, that they respond quickly?
0:20:36 – Mice and rats have become very popular research animals
0:20:39 in part because they were actually sold that way.
0:20:43 C.C. Little, who founded the Jackson Laboratory in Maine,
0:20:45 which is one of the world’s biggest purveyors
0:20:47 of mice for scientific purposes,
0:20:51 he wrote a piece in Scientific American,
0:20:54 selling the mouse as a lab animal to the public.
0:20:57 The opening line was, “Do you like mice?
0:20:58 Of course you don’t.”
0:21:01 He basically said, “Mice are awful and we hate them,
0:21:03 but they could be heroes of medicine.”
0:21:05 – Wow.
0:21:08 – It can be a replacement for other animals
0:21:09 that we are currently using.
0:21:13 At that time, dogs were a really big research animal.
0:21:17 He proposed mice as being, you know, cheaper, faster.
0:21:19 They do have all of those things.
0:21:24 We have amazing abilities to alter their genetics now.
0:21:27 But all of that stems from the fact
0:21:32 that we consider them pests, we consider them expendable.
0:21:35 – And how do you feel about that as a human?
0:21:36 – It’s complicated.
0:21:39 – Says the woman who, as a scientist,
0:21:42 did her share of rat and mouse experiments.
0:21:43 – Sure did.
0:21:45 – And I’m guessing a bunch of them died
0:21:46 in the process of that, yes?
0:21:48 – Yes, hundreds.
0:21:51 And I feel bad about it.
0:21:55 At the same time, you know, they worked really hard for me.
0:21:56 They worked hard for me.
0:21:58 I liked working with them.
0:22:00 Rats are much sweeter than mice, by the way.
0:22:02 If you’re gonna have one as a pet, have a rat.
0:22:04 Mice I like because mice are honest.
0:22:06 Mice don’t like you.
0:22:08 They’re never gonna like you.
0:22:09 Rats like you.
0:22:11 You pick one up and after a while,
0:22:13 they snuggle into you.
0:22:16 They’ll like snuggle in your armpit or your elbow
0:22:18 or they’ll get on your neck.
0:22:20 They’re sweet and they’re smart.
0:22:22 They make great pets, honestly.
0:22:24 – Okay, for the record, I’m looking here
0:22:25 at your author photo where you’re looking
0:22:28 like a regular human, right?
0:22:30 Dressed nicely, standing in a nice place,
0:22:33 but then you’ve got this rat kind of curled,
0:22:35 not even curled up, like luxuriating
0:22:37 in the crook of your arm.
0:22:39 – Yeah, that’s magrat is her name.
0:22:42 And she is not mine.
0:22:43 And sadly, she has since passed away
0:22:45 because rats don’t live very long,
0:22:48 but she was a wonderful model.
0:22:50 She did not pee on me the entire time.
0:22:51 I was shocked.
0:22:56 – This kind of affection toward the rat,
0:22:59 expressed here by Brookshire and earlier
0:23:02 by Julia Zichello, would seem to be rare.
0:23:06 Anti-rat sentiment is widespread and it is vocal.
0:23:09 Let’s not forget, New York Mayor Eric Adams
0:23:12 calls rats public enemy number one.
0:23:14 But there are other voices out there
0:23:16 and other sentiments.
0:23:19 A researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands
0:23:22 named Koon Boomer published a paper called
0:23:24 Catching the Rat, in which he examines
0:23:27 the portrayal of rats in 20th century novels,
0:23:30 movies, comics, and more.
0:23:32 In this analysis, Boomer found an extraordinarily
0:23:36 diverse spectrum of human rat relations.
0:23:38 He argues that for many people,
0:23:42 rats are no longer seen chiefly as villains.
0:23:44 And here’s Bethany Brookshire again.
0:23:46 – I absolutely think the way we see animals
0:23:49 in media can strongly affect our perception.
0:23:53 I’ve been able to learn from my own research
0:23:56 that rats are absolutely not public enemy
0:23:57 number one everywhere.
0:23:59 – You may remember the story that Brookshire told us
0:24:02 in part one of this series about the temple in India
0:24:04 where rats are worshiped.
0:24:09 – They don’t have to be the villain that we see them as.
0:24:10 They could be something else.
0:24:15 And the good news is that humans can change their minds.
0:24:16 We do it all the time.
0:24:17 So we could do it with rats too.
0:24:21 I love the movie Ratatouille.
0:24:25 I love that movie ’cause not only do I like rats,
0:24:26 I love food.
0:24:29 I’ve never yet been able to make that picture perfect
0:24:31 Ratatouille that Remy makes.
0:24:33 It never looks that good.
0:24:37 – Coming up, we go back to Jan Pinkova
0:24:41 to find out the real mission of the film Ratatouille.
0:24:43 – Really to help us get along with each other.
0:24:44 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:24:46 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:24:47 We’ll be right back.
0:25:05 – When the film Ratatouille was released in 2007,
0:25:09 the New York Times critic Ayo Scott described it like this,
0:25:12 a nearly flawless piece of popular art
0:25:14 as well as one of the most persuasive portraits
0:25:17 of an artist ever committed to film.
0:25:20 The screenwriter and director was Brad Bird,
0:25:22 who a few years earlier had made The Incredibles.
0:25:25 Bird was also one of three people credited
0:25:26 with original story.
0:25:29 The other two were Jim Capobianco
0:25:33 and the man we met earlier, Jan Pinkova.
0:25:35 – I came up with the original idea
0:25:38 and wrote a treatment, came up with the name Ratatouille
0:25:40 and the basic bones and outlines
0:25:42 of the concept and the story.
0:25:45 And then co-wrote a script with Jim Capobianco
0:25:47 and there were many versions of the script
0:25:50 with various people on the way, as is always the case.
0:25:53 And we began developing the movie.
0:25:56 – Pinkova was born in what was then Czechoslovakia.
0:25:58 But after the Soviet invasion of 1968,
0:26:00 his family moved to England.
0:26:01 He was six years old.
0:26:04 He was interested in film from early on.
0:26:07 When he was 12, he got an eight millimeter camera
0:26:08 for Christmas.
0:26:11 He won a national competition for young filmmakers
0:26:13 run by the BBC.
0:26:16 He was good at finding ideas in unusual places.
0:26:20 For instance, watching his grandfather play chess
0:26:22 by himself.
0:26:24 – His name was Tony Antonin.
0:26:26 And he was a very serious man.
0:26:28 He was the first of 10 children,
0:26:30 the son of a village cobbler.
0:26:32 And he had perfect grades at school.
0:26:35 He was an engineer who designed
0:26:38 railway engine braking systems.
0:26:40 He was a man who had a hard life.
0:26:42 When he did something, he did it seriously.
0:26:44 So when he played chess,
0:26:48 he would take as long as it took to make the next move.
0:26:50 And that’s how he won a lot of games
0:26:52 by boring the other side to death.
0:26:53 But when he was playing with himself,
0:26:55 he would just stare at the board
0:26:57 and just keep on thinking and thinking
0:26:59 and thinking as far and deeply as he could
0:27:01 until he could make the move.
0:27:04 He wanted, and then he turned the board around.
0:27:08 And then he did it again and yeah, it took a while.
0:27:11 – Jan Pinkova studied computer science as an undergraduate
0:27:13 and he got a PhD in robotics.
0:27:17 This led to a career as a computer animator.
0:27:21 And in 1993, he landed a job at Pixar.
0:27:23 They were then starting pre-production on Toy Story
0:27:27 and Pinkova was assigned to the commercials group.
0:27:30 After a few years, he made an animated short
0:27:33 called Jerry’s Game about an old man
0:27:35 who plays chess against himself.
0:27:39 Jerry’s Game earned Pinkova an Academy Award
0:27:41 and a chance to pitch a feature film
0:27:44 to the Pixar brain trust.
0:27:46 – I’m pitching to John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton
0:27:49 and Pete Docter and Joe Ranff, the head of Story
0:27:52 and Ed Catmull, the head of the studio.
0:27:55 These are just the early concepts for a film.
0:27:58 One of the ideas was, oh, this is a story
0:28:00 about a rat who wants to become a chef.
0:28:03 Everyone laughs, everyone gets it.
0:28:04 You’re sold.
0:28:06 – The idea had come to him at home
0:28:08 while he and his wife were in the kitchen.
0:28:11 – You know, how can a rat become a chef?
0:28:13 You can immediately see the central problem
0:28:15 of the story right there.
0:28:18 It is obviously a disaster
0:28:21 and it’s gonna be funny if you can make it work.
0:28:25 – But the making it work part would be difficult.
0:28:27 – We were developing this film for quite a while.
0:28:29 You’re working on story.
0:28:31 You’re working on designs, characters,
0:28:33 scenes, environments and so on.
0:28:37 We did several versions of the story reel.
0:28:41 Story reel is drawings edited with sound and music
0:28:44 to basically be a movie you can watch
0:28:45 in the form of drawings.
0:28:48 That’s how an animated film is prototyped.
0:28:51 It’s a way of making the movie before you’ve made the movie
0:28:56 because in animation, you do not want to cut animation out.
0:29:01 – Just because it’s so time intensive and expensive, yes?
0:29:04 – Yeah, and because you’re creating everything,
0:29:08 you’re making a whole world come to life artificially.
0:29:11 Every blade of grass, every gesture of the character,
0:29:13 somebody has put a lot of work into it.
0:29:15 This film had a longer gestation period.
0:29:18 By the time it was made, it was six years into it.
0:29:19 – So what happened then?
0:29:21 I mean, I know the end of the story,
0:29:23 but just give me the shortish version
0:29:25 of what happened over the next couple of years
0:29:28 between the full prototype, let’s say,
0:29:29 and the film being released.
0:29:32 – We worked on it, had a bunch of versions.
0:29:34 In making a movie like that, it goes up and down,
0:29:36 you’re continually changing.
0:29:39 One of the wonderful things that everyone should remember
0:29:41 and understand is that Pixar didn’t happen
0:29:43 because of computer graphics.
0:29:46 Pixar happened because of story.
0:29:48 At least half the effort on any one of these movies,
0:29:51 at least half is story, story, story, story,
0:29:53 and making sure that the thing that’s being made
0:29:56 is an appealing, engaging story with characters
0:29:59 that you care about that really make sense to an audience.
0:30:02 We’ve got into the character development
0:30:04 and the designs and the environments,
0:30:05 the kitchen being in Paris and so on.
0:30:09 And it involved also some fabulous experiences of research.
0:30:11 That’s a thing that Pixar was famous for,
0:30:14 getting in-depth research to feed the process
0:30:16 of making the movie authentic.
0:30:18 We ended up going twice to Paris to dine
0:30:21 in the finest restaurants and meet with the chefs.
0:30:23 The artist has to suffer, right?
0:30:25 So you have to do your work.
0:30:27 – Was there rat research as well?
0:30:28 – Yeah, there was rat research.
0:30:31 – Was that something that you were personally involved in
0:30:33 or were you having researchers feed you information?
0:30:35 And what was the information?
0:30:38 Was it the biology, the history, the personality of rats?
0:30:40 – We spoke to a bunch of people
0:30:43 with different attitudes to rats, for instance.
0:30:45 I remember the national president of the Rat Fancy
0:30:47 as Association of the United States,
0:30:50 the people who like to keep rats as pets.
0:30:51 She was wonderful.
0:30:53 She was really insightful and knowledgeable
0:30:57 about who rats are as characters, real rats.
0:30:59 One of the lovely things she told us was,
0:31:02 there’s the old cliche that dogs look up to you
0:31:05 and cats look down on you.
0:31:07 If you have a rat as a pet,
0:31:09 that’s a peer-to-peer relationship.
0:31:10 A rat looks you in the eye
0:31:13 and doesn’t feel inferior or superior.
0:31:15 It’s just, you are like me.
0:31:16 I’m like you.
0:31:17 – That’s so interesting.
0:31:19 Do you believe that to be true?
0:31:24 – I, you know, she certainly has that expertise.
0:31:27 One of the things that makes it believable to me
0:31:32 is that in the history of organized human life,
0:31:35 rats have been right there with us all along, you know.
0:31:37 – What else did you learn about rats?
0:31:40 – Biologically, they have some interesting traits
0:31:42 like rats are incontinent.
0:31:45 They don’t know when to not do it.
0:31:48 That’s just being a rat, right?
0:31:50 You poop and pee whenever.
0:31:52 So actually keeping a real rat on your head
0:31:54 would not be such a good idea.
0:31:58 – Okay, and that was a piece of real rat biology
0:32:00 you chose to not include in the film.
0:32:03 – And no, no, I didn’t seem to have a good story point there
0:32:05 for our main character, the guy in the kitchen
0:32:08 doing the cooking to be doing that too much.
0:32:11 – What’s it like to see a film like this
0:32:14 have such great success knowing that you gave birth to it
0:32:16 and you raised it, but weren’t around to,
0:32:19 let’s say, see it graduate.
0:32:20 – I was around a long part of the way,
0:32:22 not right to the very end,
0:32:25 and that’s normal for the film industry.
0:32:27 I was a first time feature director
0:32:30 coming up with an idea and getting it made,
0:32:33 which in the grand scheme of things is a pretty great result.
0:32:36 And I have tremendous respect for Brad,
0:32:38 but as a writer and director.
0:32:40 And he took great pains when it was time
0:32:42 to take over to talk to me and the crew
0:32:44 and especially to sit down and listen
0:32:46 to what my intentions had been,
0:32:49 making the story and what I was hoping for
0:32:52 and to really understand where the whole thing came from
0:32:55 and what it meant so that he could then take it his way,
0:32:57 which you have to do as a director.
0:33:00 So overall, I’m really very happy and grateful
0:33:03 that it turned out to be such a successful movie.
0:33:07 – Pink of a left Pixar soon after
0:33:11 and he worked on a few other features and shorts,
0:33:14 but none have achieved as much acclaim or prestige
0:33:18 as Ratatouille or the other projects he worked on at Pixar.
0:33:21 And where is Jan Pinkova today?
0:33:23 – I’m now here in Germany of all places
0:33:26 at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg
0:33:28 in the Animation Institute.
0:33:30 – What is the primary mission?
0:33:31 Is it education?
0:33:32 Is it outreach?
0:33:34 – It’s filmmaking.
0:33:36 It’s very much learning by doing it.
0:33:38 It’s about let’s make movies
0:33:41 and fail miserably sometimes and succeed wonderfully sometimes.
0:33:44 There’s very little sitting and cogitating
0:33:46 and theorizing and philosophizing.
0:33:49 It’s about practical doing and a lot about working together
0:33:51 ’cause the bigger the project,
0:33:54 the more of a team sport filmmaking is.
0:33:57 – This reminds me of hearing Werner Herzog talk
0:34:00 not that long ago about when he was in film school.
0:34:02 And mostly he just stole cameras
0:34:04 from school and went out and shot.
0:34:05 – Yeah, yeah, he did.
0:34:07 If you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it.
0:34:09 You’ll figure out a way somehow.
0:34:12 I’ve heard you speak about the mission of filmmaking
0:34:13 and storytelling generally,
0:34:16 which is to give people not just an opportunity
0:34:18 to be engaged and entertained,
0:34:21 but an opportunity to change their perspective on something.
0:34:24 When you began thinking about and writing Ratatouille,
0:34:28 what perspective were you thinking about changing?
0:34:30 – Really to help us get along with each other.
0:34:34 There are lots of beautiful examples of stories like this.
0:34:35 Billy Elliot, for instance,
0:34:40 that’s about a minor son in 1980s strike-ridden Northern England
0:34:43 who has to figure out how to be a ballet dancer,
0:34:44 which is the most unmanly thing
0:34:47 he can possibly be doing in the middle of this.
0:34:50 So in a way, Ratatouille is like ballet dancing with Nazis.
0:34:52 We’re not only doing the thing you’re not supposed to be doing,
0:34:54 you’re doing it with people who are ready to kill you
0:34:55 as soon as they see you.
0:34:59 I was immediately drawn to the character of Remy
0:35:02 as stuck between these two worlds.
0:35:05 He’s going somewhere where he cannot possibly be.
0:35:08 The kitchen where everyone just from the get-go
0:35:10 hates him, will kill him.
0:35:14 And on the other side, he’s betraying his people, his family.
0:35:15 He wants to work with the enemy,
0:35:18 with the people who will kill us if they see us.
0:35:21 So he’s stuck there on his own.
0:35:24 Ratatouille is an idea, as a story, it’s an allegory.
0:35:25 What’s it about really?
0:35:29 It’s not about rats and cooking, it’s about prejudice.
0:35:33 It’s about overcoming the limitations imposed on you
0:35:38 by misrepresentation, by misunderstanding.
0:35:41 It’s about racism, sexism, everything,
0:35:43 all those different forms of prejudice
0:35:46 in the form of a rat cooking story.
0:35:49 I didn’t think about the Nazis
0:35:52 until the scenes well along in the film
0:35:55 after Remy gets reunited with his family
0:35:57 and his rat tribe in the sewers.
0:36:00 And then later, he gets lost on the streets of Paris
0:36:03 and he runs into some humans who plainly hate rats.
0:36:04 They scream when they see him.
0:36:06 They literally kick him to the curb
0:36:09 and he’s made to feel disgusting, dirty, worthless,
0:36:11 et cetera, et cetera.
0:36:15 That was the first time that the allegory really hit me.
0:36:17 I’m curious, when you grow up in Europe, as you did,
0:36:20 you have a different relationship to the war plainly
0:36:22 than Americans do and a different relationship
0:36:23 to Germany and Nazism.
0:36:25 It’s interesting that you’re now living in Germany,
0:36:26 obviously, so much has changed.
0:36:31 But I am curious about the way Remy in that moment
0:36:34 was seen as an outcast, as dirty, as ruinous.
0:36:38 – Well, it’s always been a slur to call someone a rat.
0:36:42 That’s an epithet that’s used to paint them as the other,
0:36:45 the thing that you should hate and kill and push away.
0:36:47 Any story that sees the world
0:36:51 from the perspective of the shunned and the hated,
0:36:53 hopefully gives us an opportunity
0:36:56 to open up our feelings for each other.
0:36:59 – And Remy tries to convince his father
0:37:01 that the course of events can change.
0:37:02 The course of events, in this case,
0:37:05 being rat relations with humans.
0:37:06 In your film, it’s hard to say
0:37:08 whether the rats hate the humans more,
0:37:10 the humans hate the rats more.
0:37:11 It’s intense on both sides.
0:37:14 And the father argues that, you know,
0:37:16 son, nature is nature.
0:37:18 What were you going for there?
0:37:21 – Well, Django, the father, he has a point, right?
0:37:24 Everything the world tells him is he’s right.
0:37:26 There’s no arguing against him.
0:37:26 Remy gets it.
0:37:30 And you hope that the whole thing adds up to that moment
0:37:34 when Remy finally has to come out,
0:37:37 reveal himself as the cooking rat,
0:37:41 step off that ledge with no one to catch him,
0:37:44 and take that ultimate risk with the risk of his own life.
0:37:47 It’s a real crisis, so life or death choice.
0:37:49 And he chooses to be himself.
0:37:52 And hopefully the story adds up to that feeling
0:37:54 with the audience going,
0:37:55 “What will happen?
0:37:56 How will this go?”
0:37:59 Because your job as a story writer
0:38:01 is to get to that ending
0:38:04 that really has to happen in the movie.
0:38:05 There’s only one way to end it.
0:38:08 He has to find a way to be himself.
0:38:11 – Was your original ending, even if just in your head,
0:38:14 as happy an ending as the film ultimately had?
0:38:16 – Yeah, he ends up being able to cook.
0:38:17 That was always gonna happen.
0:38:19 – And interacting with humans.
0:38:21 – Yeah, because there are some humans
0:38:22 that he can interact with.
0:38:24 The humans who care about cooking
0:38:26 and who don’t care who’s doing the cooking
0:38:28 because they recognize genius when they see it.
0:38:32 What I do love is this dramatized contrast
0:38:35 of the world’s attitudes to cooking in rats
0:38:37 in one with Ego the critic.
0:38:40 Brad did a fantastic thing of casting Petro Tool,
0:38:41 which was one of his last roles
0:38:43 and really a beautiful performance.
0:38:46 And this whole zoom in to his childhood
0:38:48 when he tastes the ratatouille.
0:38:53 And suddenly this cold, cadaverous, disappointed critic
0:38:57 whose entire career has been being judgmental.
0:39:01 He’s returned to his early childhood
0:39:04 in just one moment and we feel for him.
0:39:07 – In that moment, it will remind many of us
0:39:10 of that Proustian rush when Proust eats the Madeleine
0:39:15 and his entire childhood life philosophy comes.
0:39:19 It all comes rushing back to him
0:39:24 and provokes this unbelievable examination of his own life.
0:39:29 In your case, when Anton Ego tastes the ratatouille
0:39:32 and has this reverie and trip back
0:39:34 to a very different place in time for him,
0:39:38 in that case, is the ratatouille the food itself
0:39:40 an allegory as well or is it just food?
0:39:42 – It’s love, isn’t it?
0:39:43 – Mm. (laughs)
0:39:46 – The scene, if you remember, he’s fallen off his bike
0:39:49 and he’s a kid, he’s been crying, he’s had a bad time.
0:39:54 And his mother serves him this simple peasant dish
0:39:57 and through that shows her love for him.
0:39:58 It’s love.
0:40:09 So, the restaurant critic loves the ratatouille.
0:40:12 The rat loves to cook.
0:40:14 And Jan Pinkova loves to tell stories
0:40:16 about the human condition,
0:40:20 sometimes in the form of an animated rat.
0:40:22 I asked him if he thinks ratatouille
0:40:25 may have shifted the public’s perception of rats.
0:40:29 – I hope it opens a door to just thinking differently
0:40:32 about a species that you might otherwise just dismiss
0:40:34 as a category.
0:40:36 People wanna put rats on their head in their imagination.
0:40:37 That’s something, right?
0:40:40 That’s a door opening to another way of thinking.
0:40:43 – I often wonder whether the demonization of the rat
0:40:46 is a little bit random and/or driven
0:40:49 by earlier pop culture references
0:40:51 because I think about the mouse.
0:40:53 We had Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse,
0:40:58 whereas rats, we had Templeton from Charlotte’s Web,
0:41:00 voiced by Paul Lynn, who is sinister.
0:41:02 We had the film Willard.
0:41:04 Rats are never the heroes.
0:41:08 – Look, you put a mouse next to a rat and you go,
0:41:10 okay, who’s the bad guy?
0:41:13 It’s a fairly easy choice because
0:41:14 the rat’s bigger, it’s scruffier,
0:41:16 it’s got a longer nose,
0:41:19 and it has that slightly disturbing bald tail.
0:41:21 – But these are all cosmetic differences.
0:41:22 – They are, they are.
0:41:24 – None of them are about the soul or the mood
0:41:26 or the abilities.
0:41:27 – They are.
0:41:29 Now, what is wrong with us that we judge by appearances?
0:41:32 – That’s a big question, isn’t it, Jan?
0:41:33 – Yeah.
0:41:36 – I mean, do you have any solutions for that?
0:41:37 – Exposure.
0:41:40 You gotta see the thing that you judge
0:41:44 as other early in life as just there, and it’s okay.
0:41:49 – And what’s your personal feeling today about rats?
0:41:53 – I think rats are a part of our life
0:41:55 that we need to get used to.
0:41:57 They are creatures in the world
0:41:58 that have every right to be here.
0:42:02 – Okay, we have to remind ourselves
0:42:05 that Jan Pinkova’s view of the rat,
0:42:09 despite all his research, is a fictional rat.
0:42:11 Remy is a chef, after all,
0:42:13 and none of the rats in Ratatouille
0:42:16 seem bound by the rat’s real lifespan
0:42:18 of just two or three years.
0:42:22 But is Pinkova’s view of the rat any less realistic
0:42:25 than New York Mayor Eric Adams’ view?
0:42:28 He seems to see the rat as intentionally evil
0:42:33 rather than as just another animal hustling to survive,
0:42:38 much like New Yorkers hustle to survive and thrive.
0:42:41 Neither of those views is very realistic.
0:42:44 So what is a realistic view?
0:42:48 Having now made these three episodes,
0:42:49 I would put it this way.
0:42:53 The rat is the animal no one loves until they do.
0:42:59 So what’s your view of the rat?
0:43:01 Let us know what you think about this series,
0:43:04 “Sympathy for the Rat” or any of our episodes.
0:43:08 You can reach us at radio@freakonomics.com.
0:43:11 Big thanks to Jan Pinkova and everyone else
0:43:12 who helped tell this story.
0:43:16 Bethany Brookshire, Kathy Karate, Bobby Corrigan, Ed Glazer,
0:43:19 Neal Stenseth, Robert Sullivan, Jessica Tish,
0:43:21 Karen Wickerson and Julia Zichello.
0:43:27 Coming up next time on the show.
0:43:30 If you tally up our wins and losses,
0:43:32 we have done better than prior administrations,
0:43:34 even while taking bigger shots
0:43:37 and putting together more ambitious cases.
0:43:40 Lena Khan was just 32 years old
0:43:41 when Joe Biden appointed her
0:43:43 to lead the Federal Trade Commission.
0:43:45 With Donald Trump back in the White House,
0:43:49 Khan is gone, but Trump has let stand
0:43:51 one of Khan’s signature achievements,
0:43:53 an updated set of merger guidelines
0:43:57 that is designed to modernize antitrust.
0:43:59 Why would a new administration
0:44:02 that seems to be reversing everything from the old one
0:44:04 want to keep those guidelines?
0:44:06 We’ll find out next time on the show.
0:44:08 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:44:11 And if you can, someone else too.
0:44:14 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
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0:44:20 It’s also at Freakonomics.com
0:44:22 where we publish transcripts and show notes.
0:44:25 This series was produced by Zak Lepinski
0:44:27 with help from Dalvin Aboulagi.
0:44:29 The Freakonomics Radio network staff
0:44:31 also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman,
0:44:33 Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman,
0:44:35 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth,
0:44:36 Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger,
0:44:38 Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarrs,
0:44:42 Morgan Levy, Neil Coruth, Sarah Lilly, and Theo Jacobs.
0:44:44 Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune”
0:44:48 by the Hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:44:50 As always, thank you for listening.
0:44:56 Can I say I’m not a snob?
0:45:00 I think if you say that, that means you are.
0:45:02 Yeah, that was bad. Can you cut that out for me?
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0:45:10 The Freakonomics Radio Network,
0:45:11 the hidden side of everything.
0:45:15 (upbeat music)
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0:45:18 you
0:45:20 you
To most people, the rat is vile and villainous. But not to everyone! We hear from a scientist who befriended rats and another who worked with them in the lab — and from the animator who made one the hero of a Pixar blockbuster. (Part three of a three-part series, “Sympathy for the Rat.”)
- SOURCES:
- Bethany Brookshire, author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains
- Jan Pinkava, creator and co-writer of “Ratatouille,” and director of the Animation Institute at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg.
- Julia Zichello, evolutionary biologist at Hunter College.
- RESOURCES:
- “Weekend Column: Rat’s End, or, How a Rat Dies,” by Julia Zichello (West Side Rag, 2024).
- Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire (2022).
- “Rats: the history of an incendiary cartoon trope,” by Archie Bland (The Guardian, 2015).
- “Catching the Rat: Understanding Multiple and Contradictory Human-Rat Relations as Situated Practices,” by Koen Beumer (Society & Animals, 2014).
- “Effects of Chronic Methylphenidate on Dopamine/Serotonin Interactions in the Mesolimbic DA System of the Mouse,” by Bethany Brookshire (Wake Forest University, 2010).
- “A New Deal For Mice,” by C.C. Little (Scientific American, 1935).