Give your house rat some love

The Cracked comedy website lists "The 5 Most Hated Creatures on the Planet" that don't deserve it: rats, cockroaches, wasps and so on. Rats, which are abundant in any city, are mostly considered "sewer-dwelling, corpse-nibbling cornucopias of contagion", to quote Cracked, but, really, when was the last time you caught the plague?