Can rats really eat people? The science of killer rodents.

Humans have a long and complicated history with rats. Throughout history, rats have eaten our food and transmitted diseases, so it makes sense that there’d be a certain amount of contention between us. Consequently, rats have become synonymous with insult. To be called a rat is to call your integrity into question, to align you with the lowdown, the dirty, the dangerous.

This attitude shows up in our stories as well, with the notable exceptions of Remy and Splinter, rats rarely take the hero role. They play antagonist to heroic animated mice in The Great Mouse Detective and The Secret of NIMH and serve as an ordinary horror any time someone enters a sewer or cave onscreen. More recently, rats were the source of horror in an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Warning! Spoilers for the second episode, “Graveyard Rat,” ahead.

We open on a grave robber named Masson who is strapped for cash and under the thumb of some shady characters. He needs money fast, but lately rats have been chewing through the coffins and looting the corpses before he can get to them. When a wealthy decedent is buried and the rats steal the body and all the valuables along with it, Masson descends into their tunnels, sealing his fate beneath several feet of soil. A horrifying premise, but how much danger do rats really pose to humans?

RATS IN FOLKLORE

Rats are the kind of creature that, despite actually being intelligent and nurturing, almost demand to be made the subject of myth. For centuries we’ve imagined rats becoming grotesque creatures inside their underground nests.

In 16th-century Germany, people told stories of rat kings, terrible conglomerations of multiple rats all with their tails bound together. These stories may have started as insulting allegories for powerful people. The idea was that older rats would intentionally bind themselves to younger rats and take the food they collected. It’s not difficult to see how this image of the old and bloated parasitic rat living off the efforts of its community might be applied to those in power.

As fantastical as rats with knotted tails sounds, it has actually been documented, and it doesn’t appear to be driven by resource inequality. According to Cosmos Magazine, sticky substances like sap or gum are likely culprits, and a similar phenomenon has been observed in other rodents.

In the episode, when Masson gets underground, he discovers not only a colony of rats but a gigantic, hairless, queen rat large enough to eat him for a snack. This too has roots in legend and myth. In the Mapuche culture — the indigenous peoples of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina — there are stories of Colo Colo, a giant malevolent rat creature. It is said that Colo Colo enters your house at night to feed on your saliva, sapping you of energy.

In London, there is a myth of a shapeshifting rat who hung out at the water’s edge, granting men good luck or misfortune, leading either to riches or death, according to her whims.  In modern times, that myth continues without quite as many fantasy elements. In…