[LBR]≡ Libro Free Rat How the World Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top Jerry Langton 9780312363840 Books

Rat How the World Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top Jerry Langton 9780312363840 Books

Download As PDF : Rat How the World Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top Jerry Langton 9780312363840 Books

Rat How the World Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top Jerry Langton 9780312363840 Books

I purchased this book to find out information on rats and the family Muridea. This book had a good writing style, but is full of hot words and propaganda type attachments after facts (opinion fact opinion). The author does not waste a minute to insult rat people and quickly puts them into certain classes; completely missing little children who own rodents and also the completely and seemingly normal people who own them two. He is quick to do the typical journalist thing and find the dumbest fool to write something about a rat; quickly using them as an example of all rat lovers, another example is the whole "bum" owning a rat and panhandling. I bet he would have never guessed that an old house wife, the typical Fox watching christian conservative, would own a rat. She says" people just don't know rats". Other than those shameful journalist tactics, the book is surprisingly lacking in any references and there is frequent quoting from sources that really have nothing but opinion on the rat. The book is far from scientific too; so don't even bother to look here for any biological information on the rat. The book really is slapped together and if there was research I think Mr Langton was just getting a vacation out of it. The book goes into detail into things that have little to do with the rat, like the bubonic plague and baiting, but even these things aren't gone into in any scientific detail, except when it is chastising the rat, and there is much to be imagined for the pieces between.


Tags : Buy Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top on Amazon.com ✓ FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders,Jerry Langton,Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top,St. Martin's Press,0312363842,Life Sciences - Zoology - Mammals,Human-animal relationships.,Rats as carriers of disease.,Rats.,Animals - Mammals,GENERAL,General Adult,HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIPS,History - General History,INDIVIDUAL SPECIES OF MAMMALS,NATURE Animals Mammals,Nature Animals General,Non-Fiction,Rats,Rats as carriers of disease,SCIENCE Life Sciences Zoology Mammals,Science,ScienceMath,ScienceMathematics,United States,World,World - General,ZOOLOGY (GENERAL)

Rat How the World Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top Jerry Langton 9780312363840 Books Reviews

Meandering prose manages to be both wildly innaccurate ("Feral dogs...are unparalleled in their killing ability") and kind of offensive (puts forth that there are "two basic groups" of rat owners - "those who had rats to scare or freak out people" and "those who had rats as an affected display of their kindness to society's least-loved creature"). Langton makes rat enthusiasts out to be a bunch of loser counterculture panhandling nerds. Despite what was probably a great deal of research, he manages to make several factual errors about the biology of rats, including miscounting number of toes. Author clearly doesn't like rats. Author clearly doesn't like people who like rats. If you like rats, not for you. If you like objective writing, not for you.
The book's jacket states it "...dispels the myths and exposes the little-known facts" about rats, and it quotes one reviewer's opinion that the book is "Appallingly informative." As a biologist, what I found appalling was the amount of misinformation it contained. Perhaps it's a result of the author being a writer and not a scientist, or because a lot of the "facts" he conveys seem to have come from a few self-styled rat experts he met along the way "Ben", the New York City exterminator; "Ryan", the Southern Ontario corn farmer; and "Ang", chief of a city sewer maintenance crew, who told the author that "he knows `everything you'd ever want to know about rats--and more'", to which the author adds, "I don't doubt him" (p. 150).

Inexplicably, in the first chapter's lengthy discussion of the biology of rats and their impacts on humans, there is no hint that there exist multiple species of rats worldwide; in fact, it's implied that the singular "rat" originated in the swampy jungles of southeast Asia [actually, the now-worldwide Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus, first appeared in what is now northern China and Mongolia] and simply adapted (p. 16) or mutated (p. 18) so as to be able to survive in diverse environments.

Factual errors about rats include the following all female rats over 6 months of age are "almost certainly pregnant" (p. 17); rats "can swivel their ears and, by measuring and comparing differences in intensity, triangulate and accurately estimate the site of a sound's origin" (p. 20); "Wild rats can swim well enough to catch fish" (p. 22); distribution of the black rat (R. rattus; "roof rat" or "ship rat") is limited to "just a few colonies in the palm trees above Los Angeles and a few other warm-weather cities" (p. 54); transmission of rat-bite fever to humans is normally through contact with rat urine (p. 72) [actually, it is primarily through bites]; and, small rats can squeeze through a hole the size of a pencil (p. 190).

The most blatant error occurs in the author's retelling of how an endangered flightless duck, the Campbell Island teal, was saved from extinction in New Zealand, where Norway rats had nearly decimated the species. Langton writes that a "park ranger" captured two ducks in 1976 "These... appeared to be all that was left of the species. Both were female, but... one (later named Daisy...) was pregnant [and] ...eventually gave birth to a number of litters--twenty-four ducklings in all" (p. 136-7). In reality, biologists first re-discovered the remnant teal population (thought at the time to number 30-50 birds) in the mid-1970s, but none were captured to initiate captive breeding efforts until 1984. Success was not achieved until 1994, when a pair (then dubbed "Donald" and "Daisy") successfully nested. "Daisy" successfully raised 24 offspring, but ducks don't "give birth" to "litters", and there's no such thing as a "pregnant duck".

Other faulty statements or implications are "a female rat can, under good conditions, have well over 100,000 babies in her lifetime" (book jacket) [actually, 60 pups per year for a maximum of 3 years is a generous estimate]; during the mid 14th century as plague swept through Europe, "streets were clogged with cholera-infected corpses..." (p. 27); regarding discovering the cause of plague, "modern scientific method managed to isolate the virus, the flea, and the rat" (p. 28) [oddly, on p. 61 the author correctly names plague's causative agent at "a rod-shaped bacterium known... as Yersinia pestis"]; while rats are growing in numbers and distribution in the face of human activity, "virtually every other non-domesticated animal is rapidly vanishing" (p. 29); "A mouse is a smaller and far less complex animal than a rat... it doesn't impact the lives of humans on nearly the same level" (p. 30); "the brown rat lives generally underground" (p. 42); a century ago, black rats [R. rattus] ranged all over the United States and into Canada (p. 54); in the U.S., brown rats [R. norvegicus] are considered... the second most dangerous carrier of hantavirus (p. 74); "Although dogs and cats can contract plague, there has never been a record of a human receiving plague from contact with either animal" (p. 85) [actually, in the western U.S. from 1977 to 1998, there were 23 cases of cat-associated human plague, of which 5 were fatal]; coyote-dog mixes are commonplace in areas where both animals exist (p. 102) [actually, they are rare].

While the book is certainly entertaining, a good portion of it should be considered fiction.
Every author has individual perspectives, and this author is no exception, still, we are ALWAYS curious to see what does each author write on any given subject, and read MANY varieties of publications, and then WE evaluate and come to our own conclusions which are right for US. And, so, we hope you are enjoying many blessings in your reading materials quest with our favorite and find exactly which books you will treasure or not for your own library collections for you, our families and friends.
I loved seeing a general book about rats like this one. But I'd have loved even more sucha book written by someone who has actually had and loved a pet rat. I know that wild rats and humans are eternally at war, but the comments made about pet rat owners were a bit off-putting. Otherwise this was a good book about the critters both wild and domesticated. I learned a lot about all rats including the ones I used to kill in our barn as a kid and the ones I actually pay money to a vet to keep alive.
Love it
I purchased this book to find out information on rats and the family Muridea. This book had a good writing style, but is full of hot words and propaganda type attachments after facts (opinion fact opinion). The author does not waste a minute to insult rat people and quickly puts them into certain classes; completely missing little children who own rodents and also the completely and seemingly normal people who own them two. He is quick to do the typical journalist thing and find the dumbest fool to write something about a rat; quickly using them as an example of all rat lovers, another example is the whole "bum" owning a rat and panhandling. I bet he would have never guessed that an old house wife, the typical Fox watching christian conservative, would own a rat. She says" people just don't know rats". Other than those shameful journalist tactics, the book is surprisingly lacking in any references and there is frequent quoting from sources that really have nothing but opinion on the rat. The book is far from scientific too; so don't even bother to look here for any biological information on the rat. The book really is slapped together and if there was research I think Mr Langton was just getting a vacation out of it. The book goes into detail into things that have little to do with the rat, like the bubonic plague and baiting, but even these things aren't gone into in any scientific detail, except when it is chastising the rat, and there is much to be imagined for the pieces between.