Actually both of these could have been put in the category "animals."
Agriculture
Hogs are in a class by themselves, I think. Factory-farming them in barns where they never see the sun or root in the earth is repugnant, but so is keeping them in pens where neighbors have to smell them, or letting them roam where they can and will eat humans. The Bible tells us not to eat or handle swine. That is probably the best practice. But cows and chickens? We'd probably have more and better-quality meat if we eliminated the "concentrated animal feeding operations" and ate only naturally raised, vet-tested beef, lamb, chicken, and turkey.
Fiction
Could any of this malarkey be true? Well...it's true that people who get to know laboratory rats (which are a different species and don't crossbreed with alley rats, so the "wild" rat in the story must have been a descendant of an escaped lab rat) say they're very nice to know, in their way. They do recognize things by smell, and sniff at what other rats have eaten to learn what's safe or not safe for them to eat. Most individual rats are devoted mothers if they are mothers at all. They can bond with humans and may enjoy being groomed or snuggled enough to become cuddly pets. Their ability to learn and remember sometimes declines in old age. In some ways they're remarkably like humans, with whom they share more than 90% of their DNA; but they are still rodents, and leave trails of excrement especially on things they want to eat, which rat fanciers usually prefer not to mention. Few lab rats get to live longer than a school term, since experiments usually begin with young rats who have not been affected by previous experiments, and rats who have been used in experiments are usually killed--but lab rats who are kept as pets can live two to three years.
Not that a good cat is likely to let its humans keep rats as pets.
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