Link, Russell. Living With Wildlife. Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, 2014. Web. 10 Marc h 2014. < http://wdfw.wa.gov/living/rats.html >

Remy’s demonstrated family structure in Ratatouille, while accurately depicting the family structure of actual rats, also serves as a representation of the close-knit group that is the lower class. Rats are creatures which rely heavily on the dominant male which serves as the leader of their given group, working to serve the family under the dominant rat’s rat instructions – just as Remy’s family all rely upon Django, Remy’s father, to tell them what to do and decide what’s best for the clan. And again under the command of the dominant male rat, the other rats remain close together as a group, only going 50 to 300 feet from their nest when they branch off to forage for food. However, Remy takes his own initiative and ignores the warnings of his father – the dominant male –, deciding to go much farther than 300 feet in order to delve into the world of cooking – and subsequently the world of humans. Django, of course, is upset, and for good reason. He had warned his son that humans were dangerous, that humans would harm a rat without a second thought because rats were seen as disgusting, yet Remy went and interacted with the humans anyway – and in that, Remy had committed a betrayal against his own family. Such is how it goes with the lower class and upper class’ relations with one another. The upper class sees the lower class as diseased and offensive, and the lower class, with the treatment at the hands of their oppressors, view the upper class to be cruel and dangerous. So for a member of the lower class to interact with one of the higher class – much as Remy did with Linguini and the others he later became friendly with – was not only seen as an unsafe thing to do, but as a betrayal of one’s own social family. It was a fraternization with the enemy.