Rats!

As you may have heard if you have followed my Facebook updates, we have had an ongoing rat problem. This goes back to the beginning of time. We first thought it was a lizard that was taking little bites out of fruit that we would leave out on the counter.

No, we were assured it must be a rat.

After hearing a number of heartwarming stories such as the one about how rats will eat your toes if they are sticking out under the covers… we decided the rat must die.

After what seemed an eternity (it must have been three weeks at least) we procured a trap. After setting it and being unsuccessful in my first half dozen or so attempts to the kill rat #1, (they’d eat the bait and the trap wouldn’t go off, or else the trap went off but there was no dead rat in the trap). So I gave up and put the trap away, for good or so I thought.

In the meantime we had started to amass casualties. At first it was the bananas. Then the potatoes. I thought this or that would be safe… avocado, mango, peanuts in a Ziploc storage bag. It seemed nothing was safe. One night we had Timothy’s car seat in the house. And that got eaten up. So we put everything far out of reach and made sure everything was locked up at night.

Some weeks later, my Pastor came to town, and he suggested perhaps a little cooking oil on the trap might be enough to do the trick. Sure enough, I managed to snuff the life out of a couple of them that way!

But then they were back to their old tricks, eating the bait, not setting off the trap. Nevermind. I give up. Since we’d learned to lock all of the edibles far out of reach, we should be out of the woods. NOT!

We discovered one morning much to our dismay that one of our hard plastic medicine bottles containing zinc supplements had been chewed. Not only did the rat chew open the bottle, he managed to chew the plastic on more than a couple zinc capsules. What pain. What misery. And if that wasn’t enough, he chewed through the plastic lid to a bottle of cooking oil.

In the words of Bugs Bunny, “this means war.”

I enlisted the help of Stephanie in setting the trap this time. We rigged a ketchup bottle top with peanut butter and peanuts and made sure the peanut butter went in under the lip of the cap and then tightly fastened it to the trap with a rubber band. Later that morning around 1:00 a.m., I woke up needing a trip to the bathroom and heard this “clink” . . . pause . . .”clink” . . . pause . . . “clink.” Without even heading to the kitchen, I suspected I knew what that sound meant. The rat was stuck in the trap trying to escape. Sure enough, to my horror, there it was. The trap was upside down so I didn’t have to look at the little thing’s face quite yet.

WARNING: The following paragraph is rated PG-13 for violence and horror.

Trying very hard to come up with a decent game plan in very quick order and yet quietly for fear of waking the house, I grabbed a shoe. Not a regular walking shoe, mind you, but this little piece of rubber they use for shoes here that weighs about one-fourth the weight of a walking shoe. I tried beating the rat three times with the lightweight shoe. It simply squeaked and looked like it was renewing its efforts to escape the trap and starting to make some headway. I was horrified. This is awful. What am I going to do??? It didn’t take long. I knew the thing had to die. The moment it cracked the zinc bottle its fate was sealed. With the shoe still in my hand I decided my only remaining option was to smother it. So I did. With my little black rubber shoe. It was horrible. After it was over I just wanted to cry.

I climbed back into bed and sat there wide awake for about half an hour, thinking about the awfulness of the deed I had just committed. I shuddered. I tossed and turned. And finally, restless, dreamless, unhappy sleep.

As I was reliving the horror with Stephanie the following morning she suggested the cast iron frying pan might be a better thing to try in the event there was a repeat of the previous night’s episode. She also wondered what kind of television or movies I had been watching that gave me the idea to suffocate the thing. Actually, it took me back to my childhood. I watched portions of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at too young an age. I was never able to get the horror of a certain suffocation scene out of my mind.

I concluded the ketchup bottle cap was too large and had prevented the trap from closing properly. I decided I’d try a Coke bottle cap next. Two nights passed, no rat. Walking into the kitchen late at night, I would start talking trash to any rat that might be around. “Yeah, I killed your brother, and your father, and your mother. You want a piece of this? Come on, let’s go. I’ve got some peanut butter right here. And the steel jaws of death. And if that doesn’t work, I’ve got a shoe.” Two mornings later, however, I saw #4. So the trap is once again set tonight. We shall see what we shall see.