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Chinese Mickey Mouse.

Two weeks of mousing around is plenty. 

I’ve nothing more on mice, though I continue to find it amusing as hell imagining approx. One billion Chinese having to bring a dead mouse to someone in authority to prove their faithful citizenship. Their lot was more exciting than my comparatively dull life in 59. 

But I am done with mice. Moving on.

To rats. Long-running NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa (I’m not endorsing, though my family knew a Sliwa family from Chicago, disclosure, just so you know) floated the idea of using cats on the NYC rat problem. 

Cats? Not up to the task, I’m afraid. Need a better ratter than a cat for the job. 

Felines might be OK for mice, but for rats look to the canines. 

A mere hundred years past many a family kept a dog as much, if not more, as a ratter than a pet. Generally smaller dogs of terrier type, they were known for being good ratters. 

Not surprising there were rats to control when horses and chickens were common in many neighborhoods. Horse and chicken chow was rat food. A simple equation. 

Few among us these days keep a horse or poultry, so the plastic bag for garbage replaces stored animal feed. Plastic isn’t much of a rat barrier. The rat buffet moved from animal feed to pizza scraps. The rats seem to have adapted well.

My Chicagoland family had a fox terrier, not so much as a ratter rather than for my benefit, or mom and dad’s. Ratters are energetic little guys, just what was needed to keep pace with a lively male child. 

In play, a ratter’s spine-snapping tactic kept a kid like me busy. The terrier and I wore each other out, a parental victory if nothing else. 

Rats were at something of a premium in my day. I blame the metal garbage can. But being natural-born opportunists, rats bided their time for the plastic age to bless their kind and bring it to a new promised land of opportunistic feeding. For rats, easy access to food works much the same as free money does to attract loafers, not the slip-on type.

Not wanting to offend a wide swath of readers, I will likely do so reminding them that through the longer stretch of history our (humans’) connection with canines was not as pet owners. 

Dogs worked with and for humans. Mutually beneficial relationship. Guarding, herding and control of pests were duties done by dog, accepting domestication because doing so gave the protection of the human pack. 

A non-working or pet canine is arguably useless, and they know it. How many times have I (include yourself as appropriate) seen nasty neurotic pets suffering and acting badly due to lack of purpose. 

A simple (annoying to some) view says a pet is its owner’s slave whereas a working dog is part of a team. Many pet lovers will not like this. They do not have to accept it. But the angry defense of pets I’ve seen seems to oft stem from the suggestion cutting painfully close to an unwelcome realization. 

You decide, but I think calling them pets is denigrating, reducing the worth, dignity and value of the canine.

Well, who knows? Maybe I like having unpopular ideas. Or maybe it’s no more than my notion to take second looks at settled truths. This is as much fun (to me) as imagining the CCP requiring the faithful to bring a dead rodent as proof of their commitment. 

Does show major commitment if a population leaves home, each person with a dead mouse in pocket for “teacher.” That’s more commitment than I have, because I want as little to do with days old rodents as possible. You, I imagine, agree.

But, I bet I can turn your agreement around on a penny if I challenge the new-norm truth on colonization by asking, “That bad, really?” 

Take China, notoriously famous for the Boxers who wanted to remove all trace of foreign devils. But guess what? Faced with Boxer traditionalism on one side and foreign devils on the other, a lot of Chinese found it a good deal safer and wiser to go to the devil. 

With warlords and gangs ruling by whim and fury, getting yourself near or into a foreign Concession (the U.S., incidentally, had none) was a sane, practical choice, one made by many. 

Look at most colonizing and you’ll see there were levels of native support for the benefits of foreign colonization. Some colonial activity was welcome. 

Don’t believe? 

Two colonial powers were in our area. French explorers acted as advance colonialism, quickly followed by independent French traders. The British did much the same slightly later on a larger scale. 

Were these colonial powers resisted or accepted? 

Native people were often employed directly in the trade and indirectly as suppliers of furs and provisions. Cloth, woolens, iron tools and guns were well received good that made life easier. 

Of course, not all original inhabitants felt or acted the same, but if we consider the large numbers of Metis you might think there was quiet a lot of cooperation, enough to create populations neither Native nor European.

But, darn, I have lied to you because I can’t keep myself away from the fate of Chinese Mickey Mouse. 

I’m not sure of culinary practices in century past China, but I do know someone I worked with returned from work in the Middle East with a rat tapeworm, most likely gained from eating undercooked rat. 

And remember all those mice in China? 

Maybe you and I don’t dine on roast mouse, but others have. Savory dormouse was a Roman delicacy. Yum. 

So maybe, not saying it was so but to broaden consideration, the mouse-in-bulk program was a protein harvest using protection of grain stores as a screen for aiding a hungry nations food needs with diced mouse wonton. 

All those dead mousies represented a lot of potential nutrition. Because we think of something a certain way or are given an explanation doesn’t guarantee the whole story. Not a bit, but I’ll from now on let a dead mouse lie where it lays. 

Or is it the other way?