I learned about rat kings in 1976/77. In Paris, a very smart, very funny, half-crazy fellow named
Michel Dansel fell in love with me and my parents (especially my mother, who was quite a looker). It turned out he'd written a number of books, one of them called
Nos frères, les rats (Our brothers, the rats), which I wish I knew French well enough and was enough of a writer to translate. He was also the founder of the Société internationale des rats, which put out a quarterly journal called
Rattus.
Needless to say, we learned quite a bit about rats that year.
(Lest you get the wrong impression, Michel did not write exclusively about rats. He also wrote a wonderful book about the Père Lachaise cemetery, various police procedurals, and a whole lot of other
stuff. He was a neat guy. I was a bit jealous of my mother.)