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Given the huge ecological impact that domestic cats can have on their surroundings, why don’t we domesticate more rats as our family pets, rather than vilifying them?

Barbara Sommerville
Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK

I have worked a lot with laboratory rats, and they could make excellent pets, but they would need serious genetic modifications to be made to them. Particularly, they would need their lifespan to be extended considerably because they only live for about two years.

My lab rats were exceedingly intelligent, hard working and affectionate with gentle people. If one started with wild rats, they may need to be made rather more placid, but this might be rectified by training and environment. I suspect these wild rats would be hyper-intelligent.

Nicole Keshav
Cambridge, UK

I believe people do raise many domesticated rats for lab use, and a few of these domesticated rats become pets. While I think they can be lovely pets, they are widely perceived to be similar to wild rats, which makes them less popular than other domesticated animals with less resemblance to their wild relatives. We are unlikely to mistake a domesticated cat for a wild cat, for example, or a dog for a wolf. Domesticated rats seem very like the wild ones to untrained eyes. Of course, a loving pet owner might disagree!

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