Behold rat. Behold the magnificent, clever creature as it runs from the bin you have just opened or disappears into the nearest bush. Behold rat as it is cut open or drugged or injected to improve your health in the name of science, as many millions of its peers have been. Behold rat – though you may find that tricky, because the old adage that you are never more than six feet away from a rat is comprehensively skewered in this wonderful, charming book. Wonderful? Charming? Rats?

Yes. Even Joe Shute, a man scared of the creatures, bravely takes two four-inch baby rats into his house and slowly grows to love them. He acknowledges that his fear is no less powerful for it having been socially instilled in him by a society that, for ignorant reasons, demonises rats. They are considered pests and vermin; but they are also animals that laugh when tickled and block their sleeping quarters to give themselves privacy. Shute’s pets Molly and Ermintrude are as compelling as his travels around the world of rats, which take him underground, of course, and also to meet modern rat-catchers with their ‘ratter’ dogs. In Tanzania, the astonishing Apopo rats clear minefields with their vastly superior olfactory sense, and are being used to sniff out TB on slides far faster and more successfully than humans.

Stowaway is an odd title. Yes, rats do stow away. I remember the rat guards – plastic barriers slotted onto the mooring ropes on a container ship I travelled on – although I can’t now recall whether they were to prevent rats coming aboard or leaving. But Stowaway is actually about how much at home rats are. The trouble is that many people resent sharing their homes with them. Not me. I’m the person who wrote to the allotment committee to ask why plot-holders were complaining there were rats. I’ve also made a den in my shed for the resident fox, another successful urban creature known as ‘vermin’. This category is of course subjective, and deciding which animals are unacceptable, says Shute, is ‘the height of human hubris’. That point has to be hammered home with the force of a rat’s incisors – which give it a jaw bite stronger than a hippopotamus by body weight – chomping through concrete, when pest control companies stoke our fears with their marketing, and the default reaction to a rat is to kill it.

The trouble with rats is what they carry. They probably weren’t quite as culpable as is believed for transmitting the plague in England in the 1660s. In the Peak District ‘plague village’ of Eyam, an epidemiological study found that rodents were responsible for just a quarter of infections; the rest were spread from filthy human to human. Shute’s trip to Tanzania had a dual purpose: to meet those fabulous landmine-sniffing rats but also to investigate rat-infested slums and villages, where parents showed him their children’s school uniforms, ripped to shreds by nocturnal rodent visitors, and where everyone had been bitten. Rats can harbour pathogens linked to more than 70 diseases, including bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and cowpox.

The old adage that you are never more than six feet away from a rat is comprehensively skewered

So the impulse to kill them is understandable; but it is also futile. Countless extermination campaigns have been attempted and all have failed – with the exception of one in the Canadian province of Alberta, which, in Shute’s telling, sounds frankly weird. Instead we need more enterprises like Project Armageddon. This French initiative is an earnest effort to ‘decode the biology and ecology of rats in Paris’ using genetic testing and cameras. It is long overdue. Despite centuries of schemes to exterminate rats with dogs, blunt force instruments (the Rat and Sparrow Club paid out a penny a tail) and various poisons (that rats learn to avoid, or develop genetic resistance to), this is what we don’t know about rats: how many there are, and where and how they live.

Project Armageddon has so far punctured assumptions. When cameras were installed in one area, they were expected to find up to 100 rats per hectare; instead there were between six and 12. Rats turn out to be genetically distinct depending on the milieux they live in. Rather than the indiscriminate marauding hordes of our imagination, colonies contain smaller populations of homebodies that have lived in the same neighbourhood for generations – a bit like us. ‘It is very important to have this message,’ says Benoît Pisanu of Project Armageddon. ‘They are not that many and we can live with them!’

When Shute’s Ermintrude died, her sister Molly covered the corpse with a scrap of cloth. When rats who had bonded were separated and put in a tank, they mostly floated. When they were reunited with their friends and then returned to the tank, they swam energetically – ‘as if they had something to live for’, writes Shute. His book forcefully demonstrates how little we know about our rodent neighbours and how wilful that ignorance is. With a deeper knowledge of the extraordinary intelligence and abilities of the wild rat, you may hesitate the next time you see one – if you are so lucky – and wave it on its way without murderous intent but with admiration and affection. It deserves it.