Bad Nature
How Rat Control Shapes Human and Nonhuman Worlds
"In Bad Nature, McCumber's incisive and often witty account of three distinct rat problems nibbles at the edges of human-animal dynamics. The humble rat becomes a scapegoat for moral panics and social anxieties, reflecting cultural boundaries and social inequalities. The book reveals rats as potent symbols at the border between order and disorder, us and them, and we learn much from McCumber about how people seek to assert control over chaos.
Who are the real pests in these cultural dramas? Spoiler: it's not always the rats."
"Some animals get documentaries; others get exterminators. But why? In this fresh and compelling exploration, McCumber blends rigorous data with sharp social analysis to ask a question as strange as it is important: Who's the real problem-us or the rats? This original work positions McCumber as a leading voice in the cultural study of human-animal relationships."
My 2025 book Bad Nature: How Rat Control Shapes Human and Nonhuman Worlds (University of Chicago Press) is a multi-sited analysis of various attempts to eradicate or control rat populations. I include in my study a typology of rural, urban, and island settings in which rats are defined, in different ways, as matter out of place. In rural areas, rats are seen as threats to agricultural production, as economic liabilities. In cities, they are metonyms for poverty, dirtiness and disease. Finally, on islands, rats offend environmentalist sensibilities and imaginations of “nature” by posing a threat to endemic species and their habitats. I ask the question, “what social, cultural, and historical forces have led to the targeting of rats with systematic lethal force in these places?” More specifically, I explore how rat control functions as a symbolic cultural narrative connected to other social processes where it occurs, and how rats themselves are imbued with meaning that transcends their lives and physical bodies.
This project is primarily an ethnographic study based on interviews and participant observation in three contexts: Alberta, Canada, which has claimed a “rat free” status for several decades; Los Angeles, California, where the control of rat populations practically and discursively overlaps with other institutional forms of social control; and the Galápagos Islands, where environmental organizations attempt to eradicate rats from islands to protect native species. In addition to ethnographic data collected with rat control officials in each of these places, my study also employs archival historical data and survey data used in supplemental quantitative statistical analyses.
An article based on my fieldwork in Alberta for this project was published in Cultural Sociology and received two awards: the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences’s Best Student Paper Award and the Jane Goodall Award for Graduate Student Research, awarded by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Animals and Society. My Galápagos research was awarded the Marvin E. Olsen Student Paper award by the ASA Section on Environmental Sociology. An article version of my Los Angeles research was published in Sociological Forum.
You can order Bad Nature from the press website here.