First of the Twelve, and How It Got There

The rat is the first sign of the Chinese zodiac, and the standard folk explanation is a race: told that the order of the years would follow the order of arrival, the rat rode across the river on the diligent ox's back and jumped off at the finish to arrive first, a story read as cleverness rewarded over mere effort. As a birth-sign the rat is conventionally taken to mark resourcefulness, quick wit, thrift and sociability, and in the wider Chinese symbolic vocabulary it is associated with fertility and with wealth, since a creature that finds and hoards grain is a sign of abundance. The sign is paired with the first of the twelve earthly branches and the late-night hours around midnight.

Long before the black and brown rats of the plague years reached most of the world, the Pacific rat, kiore, travelled with Polynesian voyagers as a stowaway and sometimes a deliberate food source, reaching remote islands including New Zealand centuries before European contact; introduced rats of all species are now understood as one of the most damaging factors in island bird extinctions worldwide, since ground-nesting birds evolved with no defence against a mammalian egg predator, a conservation problem now addressed through large-scale island rat-eradication programmes.