Allotment gardens are a haven for researchers interested in multispecies relations, as they are places where humans put themselves into the middle of biodiversity and try to control the nature around them. In an interview-based study led by Karolina Lukasik, we investigated the conflicts between humans and animals in two allotment gardens in Helsinki. Soon it became apparent that one conflict stood out: this between humans and rats.
The gardeners began noticing more rats in their allotments after nearby construction work started. The rats moved into the gardens as their old burrowing sites had been destroyed. The gardens offered not only new housing, but also a real banquet: human food leftovers as well as seeds and produce from the allotments themselves. The initial reaction was overwhelmingly negative — the gardeners spoke of rat chaos or rat panic, or even rat war. They attempted to eradicate the rats, though this strategy proved unsuccessful. The situation required a different approach.
Rats making claims
In our paper, we applied the political theory of animal rights by Donaldson and Kymlicka that divides animals (and approaches to them) into three categories: according to it, wild animals are sovereign, domesticated and companion animals are our co-citizens, and urban animals are denizens, who should be granted a limited form of protection. Following this theory, we started viewing rat presence and rat traces as political claims to the garden spaces. These claims could be accepted or refuted by the gardeners. The human-rat negotiations began.
What does it mean that a gardener responds to a rat’s claim? If she sees a rat feeding on her compost, she might not realize at first that the rat understood the open compost as an invitation. If she makes the compost inaccessible, for example by putting it in a closed container, she is sending a different message: “do not come here, this is not for you”. She has responded to the rat’s claim. The rat, in turn, might try to get inside the compost bin by gnawing on it — or search for food elsewhere.
On both sides, those negotiations are usually implicit; very few of us think of our everyday actions as of responding to animals’ political claims. But nonetheless, they are taking place whenever we encounter urban animals or even just traces of their presence.
A shared code of conduct
The lethal means of rat control failed, but the gardeners were also doing something else: they invited Tuomas Aivelo to give a talk about rat ecology and diseases. The fear-driven view of rats was replaced by actionable information. The garden boards required the gardeners to surround the foundations of their cottages with wire mesh (to limit nesting opportunities for rats) and to use closed compost bins (to reduce the food supply). Some gardeners also used other methods to discourage the rats from coming to the allotments, such as sprinkling used cat litter as repellent or destroying small branches that could be used for nesting.
In this process, the gardeners gained better knowledge of rats, and could communicate with them more effectively. It is also worth noting that very few of the gardeners wanted to kill rats — most of them just didn’t want to see rats in their allotments and especially near their cottages. Many viewed the rats as part of urban nature and accepted the fact that there always will be rats in the gardens.
Through implicit negotiations, humans and rats found a shared code of conduct: the rats would be left to their own devices as long as they didn’t come too close to the cottages when the gardeners were there. Even with closed compost bins and mesh around the cottages, the gardens had plenty of spaces unused by humans that the rats could use to make nests and forage. Furthermore, the rats are most active in the time where humans usually aren’t around in the gardens.
We see this as a successful negotiation that resulted in human and rat coexistence in the gardens. This arrangement is dynamic and evolves in response to external changes — just like the construction work that prompted this round of human-rat negotiations. And if we can make peace with urban rats, the epitome pests, we could get along with other urban animals as well.