European Cultures
European associations with the rat are generally negative. For instance, "Rats!" is used as a substitute for various vulgar interjections in the English language. These associations do not draw, per se, from any biological or behavioral trait of the rat, but possibly from the association of rats (and fleas) with the 14th-century medieval plague called the Black Death. Rats are seen as vicious, unclean, parasitic animals that steal food and spread disease. However, some people in European cultures keep rats as pets and conversely find them to be tame, clean, intelligent, and playful.
Rats are often used in scientific experiments; animal rights activists allege the treatment of rats in this context is cruel. The term "lab rat" is used, typically in a self-effacing manner, to describe a person whose job function requires them to spend a majority of their work time engaged in bench-level research (such as postgraduate students in the sciences).
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1800 BC, the culture of Los Millares in SW Spain is substituted by that of El Argar, fully of the Bronze Age, which may well have been a centralized state. 1700 BC, the Central European cultures of Unetice, Adlerberg, Straubing and pre-Lausitz start working the Bronze, a technique that reached them through the Balkans and Danube ... of Mycenean Greece, after centuries of infiltration of Indo-European Greeks from an unknown origin ...
... A kind of jesting rhymed prose in Russian culture is known as rayok. ...
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