But only thereafter did the first pyramids and great temples rise. The antecedents to the Egyptian civilization had already existed for centuries before African desert cats struck a work-for-food bargain with the grain-growing humans.

This means building vertical storage capacity–and that, without cats, would amount to building rat heavens. To store large amounts of grain throughout a winter, without excessive spoilage, it is necessary to minimize the extent to which the grain rests on the ground.

Yet dogs are limited as rat-catchers, because they do not climb well. The Sphinx guards the Giza pyramids from rats. As agriculture evolved, dogs distinguished themselves at herding and street level rat-hunting, as well as guarding. The much older human partnership with dogs enabled humanity to survive the Ice Ages and thrive despite constant vulnerability to predation, including by murderous fellow humans. Cats hunt Arvicanthis much more efficiently, making no demand on crops.ĭogs also hunt Arvicanthis, but if dogs had been the Egyptians’ front line of defense against rats, the Giza pyramids probably would never have existed. Humans in turn often eat Arvicanthis, when they can catch this mostly vegetarian rat, but the loss of grain protein to Arvicanthis far exceeds what is recovered in meat from those who are snared. No matter what the Pharaoh Cheops and his successors thought they were doing, no matter what their scribes wrote down, and no matter what anyone believed about an afterlife, the Giza pyramids and Sphinx are first and foremost monuments to a temporary conquest of rats by the first civilization to entice help from cats.īy enlisting cats, the Egyptian civilization for a few millennia held in check the population of Arvicanthis, the Nile cane rat, which ravages crops throughout Africa. I mmersing myself in Rat, by Jonathan Burt, and Rats, by Robert Sullivan, during my flight to Egypt for the December 2007 Middle East Network on Animal Welfare conference, I sat a few evenings later in front of the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx during a bombastic sound and light show and contemplated the role of rats in creating the spectacle before me. Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivanīloomsbury (175 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10010), 2004. (33 Great Sutton St., London EC1M 3JU, U.K.), 2006.ġ89 pages, paperback.

Rats by robert sullivan summary