Rat Story

There have always been rats in this neighborhood. Shortly after we moved in a rat mummy mysteriously appeared in the middle of our back yard, curled in a circle with its tail gently gripped between its teeth. I still have it on the book shelf over there. Mostly they don't make themselves very apparent though when they do appear it is sometimes rather horrible. I built a shallow ground-level bird bath that we can see from our breakfast table to watch the birds splashing around, and one morning I came out to find it A SEA OF BLOOD with a gnawed rat corpse floating in it. I assume it was a raccoon that found or caught a rat and brought it to wash off and chew on the head and tail for a while. Neighbors started keeping ducks a couple of years ago and that coincided with an increase in rat action. Perhaps the greater abundance of edible material caused them to settle in the locale, mostly under our shed which is between our compost bin and the duck area. I would find tunnel openings in the compost, and I trapped a few in there. The ducks have gone but the rats remain. When the young ones started wandering around the back yard a few months ago and foraging under our bird feeders I had to take steps. I brought the orange cat from across the street into the back yard to see what would happen and he vanished into the shrubbery, and I chanced to see him a half hour later striding proudly home with a gift for his family. He would come over a couple of times a week and I suppose he was getting a few of them, but he recently moved away so I had to become more serious about trapping. I hate emptying the traps. I hate seeing their black eyes and crushed necks. I hate it when they didn't get killed right away but got a bad whack on the head and crawled a foot away and died bleeding from the mouth, nose and ears. I hate killing them at all and I apologize to every one of them and put them in a rat graveyard with a stone on every grave. But it has to be done. A couple of weeks ago I set a trap in an obvious rat runway and when I checked the next day it had vanished. Never saw it again. I didn't know if it had caught one part way and it dragged it off into a hole or if a predator of some sort came and got it, or what, but I got two more traps and put screw eyes into the end of each of them with long wires to attach them to something so they wouldn't get as far. The weather had been warm enough to sleep with the windows open, and my studio windows are at the back of the house, facing the compost heap and wildlife zone. I woke one night thinking I was hearing a cat meowing, not the long lowing night time meow of a wanderer beneath the moon, but the short querying sounds a cat makes when faced with a closed door it wants to be open. As I came more awake I started thinking it might be the feed me sound of a young crow, but I could see it was still dark out, too dark for birds to be active. Just before I fell asleep again the sounds seemed to be a strange squeaking like two animals communicating. When I woke with the day I remembered those sounds and dreaded what I might find, and I found what I dreaded. A trap pulled to the end of its wire, with most of a rat in it. All but the back third. I don't know if possums will eat a rat but I wouldn't put it past them. I have seen possums here far more frequently than raccoons, but I know there are some of both around. I hate having to kill rats or anything else. I hate checking the traps in the morning whether they are empty or full, and I really hate finding PART of a rat, but it has to be done. Rats aren't squirrels - I think they get a bad rap for that whole plague thing but they don't have any sense of restraint. If they get into the house they will really be a problem so I have to deal with them as well as I can before it comes to that. That is my rat story and it is done.