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The º£½ÇÉçÇø’s resident expert on human/rat relations says 75 years without rats is a landmark worth celebrating.

credits Alberta’s for ensuring the province is one of the few residential jurisdictions on the planet to be virtually free of the pest. This privileged status was highlighted in a in July by Agriculture and Irrigation Minister RJ Sigurdson.

DeAngelo, who joined the Department of Anthropology in 2024, admits some rats occasionally hitch a ride into the province on trucks or in shipping crates. There is also the occasional infestation, such as the appearance of Norway rats at in 2023.

Rat control more important than ever

So far, such outbreaks have been rare and quickly brought under control, but that may not always be the case.

“With climate change, things could change, because pest species in general are increasing their residential radius,” says DeAngelo, adding that rat control is now more important than ever.

To that end, Alberta launched a $110,000 public awareness campaign last fall run by the  asking residents to report sightings and signs of rats. The Norway rat in particular is notorious for chewing on electrical wiring in homes, buildings and vehicles, and can pass on dozens of pathogens and parasites to humans. 

DeAngelo’s forthcoming book, out sometime in 2026 and aimed at a general audience, explores human/rat relations from a variety of perspectives. She starts with Europe’s Black Death — the 14th-century plague largely spread by a pathogen carried by rats — then examines the fight to keep rats under control in North American cities.

She takes a close look at the , which has focused on the from rat populations there but has recently expanded to include social justice issues, such as how rats affect low-income areas like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. According to the project, studies have revealed the negative effect of rat populations on mental health.

One chapter of her book covers Alberta’s . Rats were first discovered on the eastern border of Alberta on a farm near Alaska in 1950 and were declared an agricultural pest under the Agricultural Pests Act of Alberta, requiring property owners and municipalities to take responsibility for control and eradication.

Since then, Alberta has successfully maintained a rat control zone along the eastern border with Saskatchewan.

Can we learn to live with the rats?

While damaging to human communities, however, some rats provide a useful public service, as DeAngelo explains in her first book on the subject, called . As a doctoral student at McGill University, she began exploring how people live with unexploded land mines — estimated to number as high as six million — in Cambodia after three decades of war.

Since dogs are often used to detect land mines, she expected her work would partly focus on dog/human relations. She was somewhat surprised to learn that in Cambodia, trained rats were the newest landmine “technology.” The had been used for the purpose in Tanzania and Mozambique, but this was the first time it had been employed in Cambodia.

After a tilled minefield is demarcated into grids, a harnessed rat is attached by leash to two humans.

“Each time the rat smells TNT, it will stop and scratch twice,” says DeAngelo. “There’s a person who maps it out, and by the time you finish the minefield, another team comes in to detonate the bombs safely.”

What struck DeAngelo most as an anthropologist was not only the affection that emerged between rats and humans, but the way rats “mediated” relations between landmine workers, some of whom had historically been on opposite sides of military conflict. A key feature of that dynamic, she says, is humour.

“Walking between two people, the rat forces them to look at each other, stepping in unison. You’re looking at this rat, and suddenly you're laughing.

“They’re kind of goofy-looking with those pouched cheeks, and they have a completely different way of behaving than a dog. Once habituated, they actually snuggle with humans.”

DeAngelo describes one rat that assisted in a budding romance among two landmine workers. The couple would indirectly flirt with each other, deflecting to the rat as their object of affection. Eventually the couple got married.

In the end, the training process for landmine detection comes down to “learning to love the rats,” says DeAngelo, which can be a challenge given the animal’s reputation as a pest.

“It’s not like they learn to love the rats immediately … a lot of people associate them with disease, sewers and dirt.”

With a warming planet, we may one day all need to learn to live with, if not love, the rats, she says. But with the right controls, we can hope that day never comes — at least in Alberta.

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