No rat too lowly to be trampled upon

‘Who said it, and to whom?’ is a game a child of my age played back in the day when TV was still an alien concept to a child growing up in an Indian railway colony.

Even at that tender age, thanks to exposure to an abundance of books and a handful of scholarly elders, I used to know, straight off the bat, that it was Winston Churchill who had said: “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The ‘it’ in question being Russia, the year 1939, and the ‘whom’ was the radio, because Churchill’s words were part of a radio-broadcast speech. As to who said, “Friends, Romans, countrymen lend me your ears,” that was easy-peasy. I’d read the abridged story of Julius Caesar often enough to recognise the articulate, stirring tongue of Marc Antony, addressing his fellow Romans on the death of Caesar. The one that used to trip me up often was: “I promise I will return the favour, my lord!” These words often sounded like those uttered by a grateful peasant to a benevolent king. But no, this was in fact the utterance of a mouse. Really.

It was that tiny creature (now nearly forgotten, thanks to its name being appropriated by computer technology) who was speaking (in a fable, of course, by that original fabulist Aesop) and the mouse was indeed addressing a king of sorts — a lion that had just shown the mouse mercy by setting it free after first trapping it in its huge paws and considering it as a tasty little entree before dinner.

The lion, I can only imagine, laughed until its sides hurt, on hearing the mouse make such a lavish promise, prompted no doubt by the sheer gratitude of being granted a second lease of life.

As it turns out, not long after when the lion finds itself trapped and helpless in a hunter’s net it is tiny little mousie that, with its propensity for gnawing through things, comes to the lion’s rescue.

This little fable was one of the earliest instructors in my life, demonstrating that no creature (human or otherwise) is so small that it cannot help one greater. My entire childhood flashed before me recently when I read an article that informed me that the rats are at it again! Overreaching themselves, if you like. Taking on a huge, but heroic task. It almost seems to me, according to the article, that the little rat has elevated its own ambitions, going from helping lions in fables, to animals much, much larger, like elephants!

The aforementioned incident with the lion we know is a fable, but this thing with the elephants is as true and current as it can get. Consider this: The life of an African elephant, whose average weight can range between 3,000 and 6,000kg, in some parts of Africa is becoming dependent on a creature that, on an average weighs 250 grammes. It is this very lightness that, apparently, is helping the sometimes lowly-regarded rat come to the elephant’s aid.

Too light in weight to trigger a hidden landmine, charity organisations, tasked with the clearing of these devices in Zimbabwe, are allegedly using hero rats on leashes to sniff out the danger, allowing humans to move in and defuse them. A line in the article says it took 22 years of work by the government and charities to clear all the landmines in Mozambique. If that is achieved successfully in Zimbabwe, too, many a surviving elephant that will walk unharmed through the jungles once again will probably never know how much it owes its restored sense of security to a creature so tiny it might not even be spotted from the elephant’s majestic height.

“No rat is too lowly to be trampled upon,” might well be a future quote spoken in a future fable by an elephant in recognition of the heroic contribution made by its miniature saviour.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.