Masters of Dox

Are there more rats in New York City than people? Ed Sheehan, a 40-year veteran of the pest-control game, speculates that this may well be the case — and this is only one of many grisly possibilities that Rats considers. While exterminators work to trap the wily creatures in the urban jungle, scientists study rats' bodies for the parasites that live within them, trying to discover the pathogens that the rodents may be carrying in places like post-Katrina New Orleans. From this chilly, clinical environment we then travel to the gory rat-hunting grounds of the idyllic Berkshire countryside — where rat control has inadvertently become a sport, thanks to a natural enemy of rats who happens to be man's best friend — and on to Cambodia, where a rat catcher balances cages holding hundreds of little squealers on his motorcycle and sells them to a Vietnamese buyer who takes them across the border to meet a curious fate.