Headscratchers / The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

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Death

• Maurice and Dangerous Beans die, and Death shows up to claim them. This leads to a touching and amusing scene, admittedly, but there's still something odd about the situation. Beans is a rat. Unless there's a forgotten explanation, shouldn't the task of claiming him have gone to someone else? Squeak.
  • He was there too. Maurice caught him. There was a bit of awkwardness about that.

Stubborn Minds

• At the end, the people who continue to put down traps and poison after seeing the Clan are described as having minds that "can't be changed with a hatchet". Seriously? After all of the protagonists have no problem with killing non-sapient rats, including the Clan themselves, this is the Aesop you go for?
  • It's by no means true that none of the protagonists have a problem with killing non-sapient rats. The older rats don't, and the younger ones let Maurice away with it because, well, he's a cat (and you can always trust a cat to be a cat), but:
    Dangerous Beans: No rat should kill another rat.
    Peaches: Even keekees?
    Dangerous Beans: They are rats too.
  • It's not the fact they're still using traps and poisons that Terry's criticizing there, it's the fact that they do so thoughtlessly, just because it's what they've always done. People whose minds were more open would at least pause to wonder if there's an alternative, or if they might be unwittingly killing other sentient rats like the Clan.
  • The implication that they're the same sort of people who would cheer like mad for a sports team or musical group whose members are of an ethnic minority, then thoughtlessly go right back to treating people of that same ethnicity with prejudice, is there too, if you're looking for an Aesop in all this.
  • Right. It's not just the killing, it's the fact that they "ooh" and "ahh" at the amazing rats and buy rat mugs and eat rat burgers (with no rat, of course) and cheer at the rat clock, and then they cheerfully go home lay down the poison and traps just as they always do. You'd think they'd at least pause to think that maybe what they're doing is cruel, and that they'd decide to use non-lethal traps instead to let them loose. There is a drop of dissonance in that there's clearly a difference between the sapient and non-sapient rats, but the point is that the humans aren't changed by their encounter with the Clan at all (apart from the humans of Bad Blintz, of course).
  • Although our rats were a bit confused by the idea behind non-lethal traps and suggested it was useless.
  • Retiring their terriers from the competition circuit so that they can keep them at home, to scare away any keekees from colonizing their homes and storage facilities in the first place, would still be an option however.

Why The Heck Is An Aglet?

• Why did the Ratcatchers find it necessary to use shoelaces as fake rat tails, when showing off how many rats they'd allegedly killed to the unwitting villagers? They were running a rat-killing pit and breeding more rats in captivity, so why didn't they harvest real tails from the rats that were killed by the terriers or died in the cages? Shoelaces cost money, cutting the tails off dead rats they'd have to clean up anyway doesn't. And using the genuine article would alleviate the need for their "plague makes your legs fall off" cover story, when presenting "proof" for their bounties.
  • To be fair, they really are incredibly thick.
  • Rat tails rot and stink. Shoelaces don't. Besides, caged rats eat everything in the cage except for the green wobbly bit and it would look really weird to enter the fighting pit after the fight is over and cut off all the tails.
    • The pits are (presumably) cleaned on a sorta-regular schedule; after [X] fights, I imagine, so the dogs have clean footing. Take the rat corpses out of sight then "for disposal", and cut off the tails then...