More than our fair share
When I bent down to pick a piece of fruit off our small kitchen island this afternoon, I noticed one of the apples had a huge chunk missing out of it.
“What the heck, Nick? Why did you get an apple with a huge piece chewed out of it?”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
Uh...oh...If you guessed “rat” you’d be right. (Is this our fourth, fifth or sixth rat? We’ve lost count.) We have some limitations on rat catching because of the cats. Poison is out and so are spring traps (don’t want a curious kitty paw to get in there). My mother offered to loan us a large metal garbage can for our elaborately concocted trap, involving a bridge from the sideboard to the garbage can with food on the end, which would collapse into the can with the weight of the rat. Our only unsolved obstacle was how to keep the cats out of the garbage can once the rat was inside.
Fortunately, the rat took up residence behind our sideboard while we were eating dinner. I was not willing to abandon my piping hot potato and beet green frittata just to get the thing, so we left Bentley en guard, nose under the sideboard, while we finished our meal. Only then did we attempt to capture the thing. Our box catching method went flawlessly, and the thing was out of our house in no time.
Of course, we still don’t have a decent method to kill the things (we just let them go far away from our house), so if you have any ideas, let me know.
Comments:
Maybe you could just make belittling comments behind rat’s back. The shame would drive it away.
Then there’s the vampire method ... drive a wooden toothpick through its heart with a tiny little hammer.
Finally, there’s the Demolition Man solution, coined by Sylvester Stalone in the movie of the same name. The method? Rat burgers.
Out of ideas. good luck.
We’re thinking next time we’re going to pour white gas on it and light it on fire. The smell of burning rat flesh should serve as a warning to other rats.
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