pack rat
1
: WOOD RAT
especially : a bushy-tailed rodent (Neotoma cinerea) of western North America that has well-developed cheek pouches and that hoards food and miscellaneous objects
2
: a person who collects or hoards especially unneeded items
Merriam Webster dictionary
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Rats. We humans look down at them with fear and disgust. Horrific creatures from the underground, we set traps in our homes to kill them, often in the cruelest of ways. Yet, ironically, we also perform lab tests on these rodents, who we perceive as deeply inferior to us, to learn more about our very own behavior.
Might this suggests we have a lot more in common with them than most people would like to admit?
One species of rat that seems to share quite a few noticeable traits with human beings is the pack rat. Known for having well-developed cheek pouches, hoarding food and “miscellaneous objects”, as defined above, packrats demonstrate a voracious appetite for… stuff.
Food, of course, is essential, and in the wild it may be necessary to hoard it, especially where winters are long and cold.
Anatomically modern Homo sapiens (us) are said to have been around for approximately 300,000 years. Way back then, hoarding food may have been just as necessary for us as it is for today’s pack rats, especially in places like Northern Europe, North America and Southern South America, where winters can be brutal and food scarce. Hoarding food was a way to hedge our bets to avoid starvation before the cold season swept in.
Although times have changed and storing loads of food is no longer necessary in most parts of the modern world, we don’t seem to have shaken off the habit. Today we waste around 1.3 billion tons of food annually, on a global scale.
Then there’s the issue of overconsumption. In the US, where the obesity prevalence was 41.9% from 2017 to 2020 (an increase of about 11% from 1999–2000), it’s no surprise weight related conditions like heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer run rampant. Obesity cost the US almost 173 billion dollars in 2019, and “medical costs for adults who had obesity were $1,861 higher than medical costs for people with healthy weight,” according to the US Center for Disease Control.
But these facts don’t seem to stop a very significant percentage of people in the US and around the world from overeating. In fact, obesity rates for adults and children continue to grow throughout the world, and the rate of increase in developing countries is even higher than in developed countries.
When food becomes abundant, we often follow our age old instincts by hoarding and eating much more than we need. No matter how detrimental it is in the long run, our inner pack rat often prevails.
“Miscellaneous Objects”
Garbage is nothing new. Since the dawn of civilization we’ve created massive amounts of it. During humanity’s infancy, most of the trash we produced consisted of clothing (either made from animal skin, leaves, or cotton), wood, paper and leftover food, which eventually dissolved (with the exception of, say, glass, steel or other metals in more recent centuries).
Humanity’s biggest party started with the industrial revolution, which led to the first real explosion in the amount of trash we produce. Then came the invention of the first fully synthetic plastic in 1907. Plastic production really ticked up beginning in the 1950’s and since then “annual production of plastics increased nearly 230-fold to 460 million tons in 2019,” according to Our World in Data.
Today, with a population of over 8 billion people, we are drowning in our own trash. Approximately 9.1 billion tons of plastic have been produced since it was first introduced over 70 years ago. 20,000 plastic bottles are now used every second, and the amount of plastic produced each year weighs nearly as much as all of humanity.
To make matters worse, 91% of plastic is not recycled, and of the five trillion plastic bags produced worldwide every year, it takes up to 1,000 years for a single bag to completely disintegrate, while 14 million tons of plastic end up in the world’s oceans each year.
Plastics eventually turn into microplastics which have adverse health effects on humans and land and marine wildlife, and it is now found in the foods we eat as it circulates within the food chain.
And yet, with all this knowledge, more plastic, and glass, and steel, and Styrofoam, and more… “miscellaneous objects” continue to be produced at a relentless pace each and every single year. Which leads to the question, if those filthy little hoarding rats managed to grow as sophisticated as humans, creating their own languages, religions, discovering the sciences, harnessing fire, electricity, inventing the wheel, and eventually the internet, would their uncontrollable tendency to hoard reach an astronomical level that would eventually destroy the entire planet?
Are those four legged, long tailed little creatures just a more primitive reflection of ourselves, the reason we experiment on them to learn which medications might alleviate our own physical and psychological ailments?
Well… who cares? Let’s just think positive and focus on the more enjoyable things in life, like filling our well-developed cheek pouches with food, and hoarding more miscellaneous objects that will eventually end up in the ocean, because this hoarding party ain’t over yet.
If you’re a passionate reader then you may very well enjoy my fiction novel The Shadow in the Mirror, where you can find out what’s actually going on with Harold Hopkins (genre: paranormal suspense).
Harold’s only wish is to lead a normal life. Yet for reasons he can’t comprehend, he is shunned by all living things. No matter how hard he tries, he is unable to garner attention from the woman he loves, nor can he foster genuine friendships or find a decent job. Meanwhile, since childhood, he has been haunted by his own reflection in the mirror, which frequently acts as a window to another world. The person on the other side is everything Harold wishes he could be, like a clone of himself leading the fruitful life he was destined to lead. He finally sets off in search of answers, where he learns about the unearthly events that took place when he was born, and discovers the tantalizing truth about his own existence…
