There's a rat in the fiction

Notwithstanding the best efforts of the Disney Corporation to convince us otherwise, the animal kingdom is not inhabited exclusively by sentimental cutesy-wootsy creatures.

Ducks, for example, share an unpleasant predilection with humans: not a penchant for being stuffed with oranges (that applies only to perverted MPs), but a propensity to commit violent rape. Dolphins masturbate incessantly, which is presumably why they sport that same benign and slightly dopey grin all day, whether they're frolicking with New Agers or cold-bloodedly devouring an entire shoal of fish.

As for the seagull, it likes to terrorise smaller birds who have just eaten, because it knows that they'll vomit (to make their escape easier), after which the seagull can gobble the regurgitated food. Incidentally, I'm attempting genetically to improve the species' woeful manners by crossing it with a parrot, so that after it's dumped on your head, it can swoop down to apologise.

Even Disney couldn't depict the rat in a favourable light, and only the late and unlamented TV-am has ever really tried (Roland being the only known example of a rat swimming towards a sinking ship). Ever since they were held responsible for spreading the Great Plague of London in 1665, Rattus norvegicus and its cousins have suffered from a poor PR image, and last night's ONE Life: Rat Attack (BBC1) certainly didn't do them any favours.

"Wherever you live, he's never far away," warned Nicholas O'Dwyer, adding that there are 60 million of them lurking in our cities, before homing in on Liverpool as one of the nation's most fertile breeding grounds. And what followed were 40 deeply unpleasant minutes of television, as the creatures were hunted, maimed and killed in a variety of barbaric ways by the local citizens, images shown presumably in the belief that horrible rattings will lead to wonderful ratings.

As A Life of Grime and Infested have proved, films about the horrors that lurk in our own homes are cheap to make, and the "urgh" factor can reliably pull in an audience. So it was that we toured the garbage-strewn back alleys of Bootle to watch scally boys as young as five wielding sticks with which to beat out the brains of unlucky rodents, then boasting proudly about how they'd stomped on the baby rats and crushed their tiny skulls.

"They're as big as cats," said one resident after another, holding their hands several feet apart, but in truth the corpses were barely the size of new-born kittens, which is probably why two pathetic flakjacketed wannabe mercenaries called John and Yoss had such difficulty in hitting them with the air rifles that they clearly wished were Uzis. "I've turned that one into a pencil, it's got so much lead in it," they bragged, but most of their pellets hit thin air and before long it was hard to be sure which was the more badly shot - the rats, or this documentary.

At no point did the programme question the violence of the exterminat ion methods being used, nor point out that professional pest controllers normally use poisons and traps to dispose of rats in an efficient and humane (although not televisually exciting) manner.

Worse, producer/director O'Dwyer adopted the usual condescending, mocking tone that he's long mistaken for wit, telling two housewives that "You look like ladies who like to keep a nice clean back passage", and light-heartedly encouraging children to crow about the beatings they carry out as though they were worthy of praise, when any psychologist will tell you that an early taste for animal cruelty commonly leads to anti-social behaviour in later life (the killers of Liverpudlian toddler Jamie Bulger, for example, had previously made sadistic attacks on animals).

At best, this was the urban prole's version of fox hunting (complete with ferrets and terriers), and most of the participants seemed to enjoy their own squalor, because otherwise they could easily have eradicated the whole problem by simply clearing up the mounds of rotting garbage on which the rats fed and the split black bags in which they built their nests. Have these people forgotten the wise words of President Kennedy? "Ich bin eine bin liner," he said, a message upon which these Scousers would do well to reflect.