Sir

One has to admire the guile and tenacity of the lone rat described by James Russell and colleagues (“Intercepting the first rat ashore”, Nature 437, 1107; 2005). This rat lived for ten weeks on a small, booby-trapped island, visited by trained rat-killing dogs, before swimming a quarter of a mile to a neighbouring island, where he survived a further two months of concerted efforts to eliminate him.

When the story aired on national public radio in the United States, the tone was contrived to foster the ‘sinister rat’ stereotype. I, for one, sympathize with this castaway doing his best in a hostile world. Russell and his colleagues show us that rats are intelligent, and other studies show them to be social creatures capable of a range of emotions, including joy (see, for example, J. Panksepp and J. Burgdorf Physiol. Behav. 79, 533–547; 2003). They deserve more consideration than we give them.