Woman Brings Home Two Rats, But Then She Quickly Notices Their Strange Behavior

When Kimberly decided to adopt a couple of animals, she didn’t go down the usual path. Cats and dogs weren’t in the running here. Instead, she chose to welcome two rats into her home. But it didn’t take long for her to pick up on something rather odd. Kimberly’s tiny pets were behaving quite strangely in their new surroundings...

Edgar and Fergus

Kimberly couldn’t believe her eyes — and neither will you! A resident of Chicago, Illinois, she made the decision to adopt the rats in February 2021, naming them Edgar and Fergus. They were both just a couple of months old at the time, having been born in December 2020. We bet you’re curious: what exactly was it that drove her to bring these animals home?

Kimberly’s reasoning

Well, Kimberly provides an answer in a GeoBeats Animals YouTube video that was posted in April 2022. In it, she says, “I really liked having small pets. [And] just where I am in life right now, it doesn’t make sense to have a dog.” Fair enough. But we get the feeling that a lot of you are still going to be a bit puzzled. Why rats?

The stigma

It could be argued that no other animal has a bigger stigma attached to them. Rats have been catching heat for centuries, dating all the way back to the 1300s. The little critters were believed to have been one of the main catalysts behind the Black Death, the plague which absolutely devastated Europe. Records indicate that around 25 million Europeans lost their lives to the disease.

Shifting opinions?

Ever since then, rats have been unfairly stigmatized as disease-carrying, filthy animals by many people. But in the last few years, the assessment of their presumed role as disease-carriers has started to waver. You see, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science journal published the findings of some new research into the Black Death in 2018. It concluded that humans were the biggest spreaders — not the rodents.