Joe Shute
speaker
145 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 25 Jul
Joe Shute’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I write in the book that a rat is a verb as well as a noun.
And we talk about ratting someone out in a way that we don't use other animals' names like that.
When I started to look at some of these kind of stories, the sort of cultural imprint of rats, you begin to see that a lot of it is kind of human made and a lot of it is real sort of myth making.
There's the common refrain that you hear all over the world in the US as well, that, you know, you're never more than six foot away from a rat in New York or a major city.
And when I kind of looked into that, that's just sort of total urban myth and rubbish.
This kind of reputation, part of it is kind of fair and part of it is just something that's imposed on them by people.
For example, rats are seen as real kind of harbingers of disease.
And I grew up in history lessons at school being told that black rats were responsible for the black deaths which spread across Europe.
Europe in the Middle Ages and wiped out more than half of the entire population of Europe.
But in recent years, researchers have been reappraising some of that evidence and looking into mortality data of plagues and found that actually it was human born fleas that were far more responsible for the Black Death.
and because of the speed at which the disease spread through it.
And there was one even intriguing study which was very well researched by a rigorous group of academics and they mapped climate data to plague outbreaks and came to the hypothesis that actually it was gerbils rather than rats that
could have been responsible for being the source of the Black Death, because there was a particular type of weather pattern that led to a massive explosion in wild gerbil populations that year.
So they've been unfairly blamed, but equally they are the perfect carrier of many diseases.
There was a rat that was caught by researchers at Columbia University in New York a few years ago.
They
caught subway rats and thought they'd investigate it to see what diseases it carried.
And it was a quite frightening amount over at least a couple of dozen diseases, some very nasty ones and some most ominously of all, which weren't previously known to exist.
The fact that if you see a rat, it's going to spread it to you is total myth-making.
Squirrels are carriers of plague and actually responsible for more plague infections in the US than rats.
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