ABSTRACT: Ultimately, this paper is an invitation to profoundly reconsider and reconfigure domineering anthropocentric relations between human and non-human animals, particularly with so-called pest animals. I focus on rats as quintessential exemplars of “the pest.” First, I discern disgust from related sentiments with which it is often con- flated. Then, I problematize disgust insofar as it is used as a moral paradigm since it is not amendable to reason and thus becomes a sort of aesthetic. The problem thus becomes that we are reluctantly left with collective disgust-feelings toward rats that we may come to recognize as immoral; and yet cannot rationalize them away, nor could we relieve them by realizing the total purification they seek. Here, I offer subversive art as a potential alternative for absolution, given its capacities to radically reconstruct the perceptual horizon of that which is possible. I conclude with Disney-Pixar’s 2007 film Ratatouille as an ambivalent case study of such art where disgust-feelings are nonetheless confronted and subverted.