How many species are basically the same if you completely ignore differences in size, texture, color, and behavior? If you squint right, we're just apes in suits. It's almost like all those small differences add up to an outsize impact.
Any two entities are the same, if you define equivalence in such a way that it ignores all their differences.
"ABC" and "Abc" are the same, if we ignore case, and so it goes.
You can't fix it with absolute equivalence, because absolute equivalence requires that some entity A is only equal to that same entity A, and no other entity; that is then inapplicable if we want to use equivalences for division into classes that have more than one member.
Granted, I suppose "orangutans in suits" would have made for a more accurately-inaccurate analogy. Though perhaps to drive it home further, if you squint, orangutans are just fuzzier people who don't reproduce uncontrollably and spread environmental disasters so much.
I have both in my neighborhood. Squirrels live in the trees, prance around my yard, are very passive and bury nuts. The rats live in the trash heap that my shut-in neighbor keeps in her garage and property, carry disease and are quite aggressive. They may be similar in biology but not in behavior or diet.
They also seem to enjoy just stashing nuts in out of the way places instead of burying them.
Here's a Douglas squirrel adding to a stash she had in my garage [1]. I've seen her adding to that particular stash at least a dozen times. Here's another one I've seen her add dozens of peanuts to [2].
I went to get a towel from a box of shop towels once and found a dozen peanuts. She went to add another one to that stash, but I was standing right next to it which caught her by surprise [3], so she instead added it to a little pile she kept on a nearby windowsill.
My favorite story of squirrel shenanigans: Back home in Ontario, late one night, driving back from a friend's place I saw an SUV dropping sparks and flaming debris on the otherwise completely empty stretch of highway.
I flashed lights, waved, & honked enough for the driver to pull over. I tell him what I saw coming out from under his car and there was a distinct burning smell we could both smell even just being parked next to him. He pops the hood to see if there's a fire and sees a bit of smoke and I would guess about three hundred or more pine cones, chestnuts, and acorns rammed into every available space under his hood.
We both had a good laugh, and I wished him luck and went on my way.
Squirrels don't break into your home in the middle of the night and trash your stuff. That's why I don't mind squirrels and despise rats. Maybe it's that squirrels don't have the ability to squeeze through tiny little holes in foundations and so forth that makes them better neighbors.
The leave pretty big divots in the yard, but as long as they stay out of the attic, I don't mind much. A squirrel's tail does look like a rat's if it has the sun behind it.
Squirrels don't always bury nuts. They will drop them into a convenient narrow opening. You may be able to exploit this behavior if you have, say, a walnut tree. Drive a vertical pipe into the ground, let the squirrels drop their nuts into it, then take the pipe and the nuts. You effectively have gotten the squirrels to harvest the nuts for you (with some inefficiency).
On the other hand... squirrels can also carry disease. Around here it is not unknown for them to carry bubonic plague.
At my old house we had a family of squirrels that lived in the trees at the back which I would feed. One night I looked out the window and I saw a rat eating the nuts I had left out for the squirrels earlier. The rat somehow climbed up the fence and managed to get onto the squirrel feeder. After I saw this I brought a new feeder so that the squirrels had to jump to the nuts which meant the rat couldn't get to the nuts anymore, but then my girlfriend asked why I care more about squirrels than the rat and she had a point because the rat wasn't doing us no harm. It wasn't getting into the house or getting into our bins or anything like that. It was just eating the left over nuts in the evening.
I'm an animal lover so it weighed on my conscience for a while, but I think there probably is a difference between the two. I was happy to feed the squirrels because I knew they wouldn't get into the house or damage my property. On the other hand a rat investigation can be a nightmare. Rats are cool creatures, but there's a reason people don't like them.
We just found this out last week! The squirrels ruined our swing cushion on the porch. We were totally confused when we saw the torn cushion but later my wife saw a squirrel picking out the cushion fiber and carrying it to the tree.
Rats can jump. I stored some dog food in my garage and didn't think they could reach it, but they were able to jump across a sizable gap between shelves.
I wish someone would investigate these squirrels and interrogate them under oath. Get them on the record and not let them weasel out of telling the truth.
It has been already admitted that the Atlantic is a questionable news source.
Obviously they are just as hungry as rats for your clicks onto their ads so they can continue to write up more nonsense like this article. Perhaps there's not enough rats subscribing to the Atlantic today?
So it doesn't surprise me to see the comments to this article here and that Atlantic is now turning their attention to doing hit-pieces on squirrels? Oh dear.
It really is garbage in, garbage out, for all the rats to read it and give them ad money if you are not paying. No wonder that article is free; and many others.
I completely and categorically disagree. The New Yorker has derailed on many fronts. It has become an ideological hell hole. If you have access to a public library, you can browse pre-2000's New Yorker on archive.org which was a totally different publication all together.
They are very similar publications, but I'm not sure which one is "dumbed down" relative to the other. Instead, there is a lot of variation within each magazine. Some articles are brilliant examples of "long form" journalism which sometimes later get expanded into entire books, others are puff pieces, and yet others (like this article) are somewhere in between.
As someone that dated an Atlantic contributor (as well as her being the senior editor over at The Walrus, Canada's answer to The New Yorker) I can very clearly give you an answer here:
The Atlantic is great, but it is in no league with The New Yorker. I wouldn't have called it "dumbed down" but it's still not as sharp and that is ok. The world appreciates both.
They’re like every other media outlet; trying to trigger people into having an opinion that does not matter, because the public having opinions that matter would mean a low effort blogger has to get a job.
Squirrels are really smart. I once tried to chase one away from a tree using a fishing rod, but it just moved to a distance an inch longer than where the rod could reach and stayed put, just keeping an eye on me while I was there.
They are known to spy on each other and to steal each other's "investments." (Also, if one notices that another is watching, it will pretend like it's hiding the food here and then take it someplace else.)
I totally hate (grey) squirrels. The damage they do to my garden is turning me into Mr McGregor. Just today I removed multiple discarded peanut shells from a bed I was preparing. (Perhaps I just hate the humans who feed them these.)
They've dug holes in my lawn, killed a sapling by digging into its pot. And they are so tame you have to chase them off from close quarters.
I've had a bit of luck with using a homemade 'mace' spray on my plants to keep them away. A high concentration of peppermint oil and capsaicin emulsified as a very light gel using xanthan gum. I end up having to apply it every other day to be effective, but I have seen it turn away squirrels with my own eyes.
The other thing I've done is set out a small water bowl and another bowl with some pumpkin seeds for them. Given the presence of my homemade mace, they usually choose to just forage in the 'safe' seeds and water and leave my plants alone.
But if they ever lose that distaste, the next option will be nuclear.
They pulled down and chewed on every one of the corn plants I grew a couple of years ago. They didn't eat them all, just seemed intent on maximum carnage.
Rats are fine by me as well and I also had a number of them as pets over the years. That said, the rats in San Fran that I saw a couple of years ago when visiting were HUGE and I was not a fan.
I suspect some of the fear of rats is that they generally give off the vibe of "I'll bite you if you get close" vs. the skittishness of squirrels who will scurry off up a tree if you even try to approach.
We can talk about behaviour, or aggression, or disease, but i think even if rats acted like squirrels in every way, but still didn't have the bushy tail, we'd prefer squirrels.
Growing up on a farm we were constantly shooting squirrels out of fruit trees and off of bird feeders. It was amazing to me how they were barely concerned with gunfire and not at all bothered by the dead bodies of other squirrels. There were a few days I probably shot 5-6 of them all in the same place in the span of just a few hours.
Can't grow pumpkins around here anymore, since the furry tailed tree rats discovered that pumpkins are full of pumpkin seeds. Ever since that year, every pumpkin big enough to bore three inch hole into has had a three inch hole bored into it and its insides removed. From there they decided to test the nearby winter squash and will mostly destroy that, too. Not a fan of squirrels anymore.
Its incredibly annoying that in CA they are not considered pests if they're destroying your garden. Your home, sure, but your garden that you might still have spent hundreds of dollars and immeasurable amounts of time are 'fair game'. You're not even allowed to trap them to release elsewhere.
We seem to be the minority though. I know multiple people in real life who have an absurdly irrational reaction to rats. They react to merely seeing a rat or mouse scurrying around the way you might if you suddenly felt a tarantula crawling up your neck. Interestingly my wife is one of them, and my daughter once thought mice and rats were cute (I agree!) until she saw mom freak out, and now she's just as jumpy. Makes me wonder if this response is in-built or learned behavior.
I've had mice, squirrels and raccoons in the house. The raccoon had made a little nest in an attic space and gave birth to three kits. It was cold, so I didn't want to evict them, so I let them stay and I put up a camera recording on slo-mo on a VCR. I learned a lot about raccoons. The mother raccoon is a very very caring and devoted mother. She also keeps the nest completely clean. She always left and went outside to do her business. She removed all her kits wastes as well. Eventually, when it got much warmer and she started to chew the batten boards, I did evict her humanely. She had done very little damage to the house and no mess. I was probably lucky to get a good one.
I had a squirrel fall down the fireplace chimney and roam the house while we were on vacation. My friend checking on the house discovered her after she'd been trapped inside for a couple of days. Squirrels poop everywhere they go, so I could tell everywhere she went. She explored the whole house, but spent the most time looking out the ground floor windows. The fireplace ashes on her hands revealed things she touched. There were black marks all over the window cranks, but few marks on the window sashes. It looked like she had tried to operate the window cranks. I appeared she understood that if she could move them the right way, she could open a window and get out, but she had been unable to move them. She found a bit of peanut butter to eat, and she shredded our curtains. Apart from that she did very little damage and the mess was limited. The poops are pretty dry, and she only peed in a couple of specific locations, not everywhere. I did a cleanup before my wife returned home, and as I cleaned up, the things I observed caused me to develop a lot of empathy for the trapped and frustrated creature, who didn't want to be there. As for the mouse, that was an experience I doubt most of you would believe.
Squirrels around here are super annoying. They love to play dodge wheel. I hate it because I don't want puncture a tire because of one of those little shits.
> Squirrels in North America used to migrate in massive numbers, following cycles of bountiful acorn harvests. When settlers first arrived in this country, they reported squirrels being so thick in the trees above during a migration that they nearly blocked out the sun. The best part — squirrels could do most of the journey from the East coast to Indiana without touching the ground.
> But as settlers started to clear the old growth oak forests, the great squirrel migrations became fragmented. Where squirrels had to cross fields, they were killed by coyotes, foxes, and other predators, including people who reported killing hundreds of squirrels (and getting three pennies a pelt). The last great squirrel migration was in 1968 in Wisconsin, when hundreds of thousands of squirrels were seen migrating (and dying on the highway and in lakes). One fisherman reported a wave of squirrels swimming toward his boat and nearly sinking it as they ran over him. Since then, this mass migration behavior has gone extinct.*
I wonder if the right wildlife corridors were setup would the migration patterns resume? Or is this part of squirrel culture and once eradicated is gone?
I cannot remember who should get credit for this: rats=bad hair day in sewers and run down buildings versus squirrels=good hair day in the parks and trees, and the squirrels hired a very good public relations firm. See how much of a difference that makes?
it's an interesting premise - how to explain our irrational categorisation of animals as tolerated vs not tolerated. I believe it is in the main due to the animals attitude to us.
here's my sketch framework
1. Pets - vassalized companions who accept human hegemony
2. Prey - harmless food, too dumb to realise what we have in store for them
3. Predators - resistant to human hegemony, dangerous competitors which need to be contained
4. Pests - resistant to human hegemony, not direct competitors but more invidiously have figured out a way to uniquely exploit the system we have set up exclusively for human benefit. To be exterminated
they are also edible, so prey item in some cultures also. Truth is you can move animals across these boundaries but it does feel unethical. Rabbits good example - clearly widely eaten, yet once a pet, could you turn it into food? You'd be a wrong 'un if you did!
I haven't yet had a squirrel crawl into my car, hide berries everywhere, eat the firewall insulation, chew other rubber parts and wires, or build a nest in the glove box.
I also haven't yet had a squirrel carry dog poop onto my deck, thinking its a great way to build a nest under the deck.
I haven't yet had to clean squirrel poop while thinking about how much fun it would be to catch the hantavirus while the healthcare system is overloaded with covid.
If a squirrel decides to partake in these activities, I will also start treating them like rats.
Near the place that I live squirrels are vital to the ecosystem. Basically they can't remember the location of all the seed that they buried and forgotten seeds become trees :)
I've often wondered along similar lines, and my explanation was always related to what's mentioned in the article as well: the Black Death killed around two thirds of the European population, without rats being identified as the main source of the disease. So today's Europeans (and Americans with European ancestry) have a high probability of being ancestors of people who, for whatever odd reason, had an intrinsic aversion to rats.
This doesn't affect your evolutionary argument, but rats didn't spread the Black Death. Human lice was the carrier. We've only recently confirmed this previously minority theory through genetic evidence, but it always fit the data better. Goes to show that there is some sort of deeply held aversion to rats such that people were more willing to believe that explanation.
I don't understand it. I think mice and rats are cute :\
I learned about it on a BBC documentary about the Black Death I saw a few years back. I'm about to run out the door so I haven't the time to properly figure out which one and see what paper they were citing. But I remember it was a French university that did the genetic tests, IIRC.
The data which fit that theory better came from London and some city in Scotland (Glasgow? I'm not sure.) Basically there were houses which shared gardens (where rats would live) but the disease didn't spread between the two houses. Likewise in London there was a poor district that got hit hard, and a rich district next door that saw very few infections. Due to the way the sewers were laid out, the rat population was the same between the two. But the lice wouldn't have transferred without close contact, which of course rarely happened between rich and poor.
The more damning evidence was out of Scotland where the doctor making a very detailed study showed that the disease only transferred between people who shared close living quarters. And in particular, during a lockdown with all-day curfew it didn't transmit at all. But where beds were reused, the new inhabitants got sick.
But the genetic evidence sealed the deal. I'll have to look up that French study later.
In the 90s there was a great sitcom called Spin City with Michael J. Fox and subsequently Charlie Sheen. The best line about this topic I've ever heard was on that show, "Squirrels are just rats with good PR".
I wonder how well that show holds up, doesn't seem like you can stream it anywhere other than Pluto which I don't have - maybe I'll get yet another streaming service...
It's my favorite sitcom of the 90s. The jokes are witty and have punches to them, and the show doesn't try to pretend its social observations are philosophically deep.
The squirrels are working for the pigeons. Spies, every last one. Those pigeons, they're the masterminds. They'll sell you to the highest bidder, and you'll never see your family again. Just keep a low profile, and maybe you won't become a target.
Squirrels are a pain just as rats are but in another way. They're all around the apartments I live in and constantly get into our plants and destroy them. I spray cayenne pepper and other deterrents once in a while but they don't always work unless you keep at it multiple times a day.
No, it's not PR operation, and no, Sarah Jessica Parker does not have anything of interest to to say about the matter.
Squirrels are obviously very different from, and much smarter than rats. Their appearance and grooming are a reflection of this deeper fact, not simply a gimmick or an accident.
Rats are social animals and much smarter than most of rodents (including squirrels). Trust me, my mother was behavioral biologist, and she experimented with both rats (black rats, Rattus rattus) and red (European) squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris).
I'll have to take the subject up with your mom, then. On the surface, at least, almost everything that squirrels do (from their manual dexterity to their nest building and food storage) suggests that they operate on a higher plane than rats.
Possibly unpopular fact: lots of people hunt and eat squirrels. So this is another way we define differences between otherwise similar animals: one is food, and the other is not.
