Stowaway: What Sheffield author Joe Shute learnt from taking rats as pets during lockdown

Rats exist in the corners of our minds and the borders of human consciousness. But occasionally – and often in moments of great human drama, be it fire, flood, war or plague – the rats rise up.

So it was during the coronavirus pandemic. Suddenly, it seemed, people were seeing rats everywhere. In The Plague, the 1947 dystopian novel by Albert Camus, the first sign that a lethal disease had gripped the Algerian port city of Oran is when the rats begin to stream out from the sewers and die in the streets in their thousands.

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Covid-19 elicited a similar phenomenon. While our cities locked down and restaurants and takeaways shuttered their doors, the urban population of rats was deprived of its usual food source. Forced to seek out new feeding grounds, the starving rats went on the march.

There were flurries of reports of rats burrowing into cellars, clambering up drainpipes and colonising compost bins. Rat-catchers experienced a surge in call-outs to homes and businesses.

Yet all these new sightings were in truth little more than an indication of our own world being in flux. The rats were simply following as we changed our routines, adapting to us. It is what they have done for millennia.

As lockdown dragged, a long winter lay ahead of us and with little else on which to focus my mind I thought about Beatrix Potter’s eulogy to her fancy rat – a domesticated form of Rattus norvegicus. I started looking into it more and discovered a whole world of rat appreciation I never imagined existed, with a National Fancy Rat Society and pedigree shows akin to Crufts.

I wanted the opportunity to study rats up close, to see the characteristics that inspired such antipathy in so many humans and, if I am being honest, myself. I wanted to examine and if possible conquer my own fears. I wanted to better understand rat emotion and intelligence, and to find out if there might be a way we could live alongside each other. And I wanted to hold a rat in my hand and feel its soft fur and the pulse of its little heart beating 400 times a minute.

That is how two rats we named Molly and Ermintrude came into our lives. With friends and family reduced to flickering faces on a computer screen, we found solace instead in rats.

As we stroked and tickled Molly and Ermintrude, I was surprised to discover they responded in turn. I had assumed they would be indifferent to affection and at best might merely tolerate the odd caress in return for some food.

Instead, once they had established that we were not a threat, they started actively seeking out the feeling of our fingers on their fur.

The rats were also very affectionate towards each other. When not fastidiously washing themselves, they would groom one another. We would often find them squashed into the oven-glove hammock together, sometimes layered in a rat sandwich with their tails drooping out at either end.

During the day they slept together, curled up in a ball in their nest. When they emerged, sleepily, would perform the most delightful ratty yawns.

Caressing a rat is a little like stroking a cat or dog, but on fast-forward, as this is how they live their lives. We sought to sit quietly with Molly and Ermintrude, attempting to watch a film with them huddled on our laps, but this is not the ratty way.

Once out of the cage they would be constantly exploring, twisting out of our hands and squeezing into the gaps between our backs and the sofa cushions. To try and contain them, we made them runs out of piles of books in our living room with food hidden in the corners, watching as they leafed through the pages in pursuit of a square of Shreddies.

They sniffed and scratched and sprayed their scent on the carpet and nibbled the soles of my slippers, and I started developing a fierce affection for our rats.

We have known since the 1990s that rats laugh. We also know that if tickled by people, rats will giggle more readily and form bonds with whoever is playing with them.

Rats are capable of empathy, altruism, regret, and possess impressive powers of memory as well as being able to judge time. We know this through a host of studies, and yet the vast majority of laboratory rats involved in these studies are killed either during, or immediately after, research.

Some biologists and philosophers have drawn comparisons between our modern treatment of rats and the brutal primate experiments of the 1950s and 1960s, which deliberately psychologically damaged animals in order to better understand the human mind.

Such experiments on primates rightly provoke outrage today, but are not rats equipped with similarly rich emotional lives?

Over the centuries we have deliberately bred rats with high blood pressure and a propensity to develop specific tumours and cardiovascular disease.

We have electrocuted rats, drowned them and trained them to self-administer cocaine and heroin. Rats are sentient creatures that feel pleasure and pain, and yet within a bulk of the scientific community and society at large, anything is deemed acceptable, so long as it benefits us.

Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat by Joe Shute will be published by Bloomsbury on April 11. RRP £18.99