Did I mention we are sharing our house with a rat?!? Well, maybe we aren't anymore, if we were successful in our rat homicide.
It all started when I was cleaning the plastic bags out of the cabinet under our sink. We just kept stuffing them under there when we went to the grocery store and we couldn't use it for actual storage anymore. So I decided to clean it out. Well, I stuck my hand in those bags, and it came out covered in rat pee. So of course I called Bob to finish the job :) Those rat(s) had shredded a bunch of the bags up and made a nest and it was soaked in pee and there were tons of droppings too. It was so gross, but more than that, it creeped me out that there had been a rat living under our sink! When I was doing dishes it was less than a foot from me! Well, at the time we thought it was a mouse, and I kind of think mice are cute, but it is still kind of creepy to think of other creatures making nests in your cabinets. So we went and got humane mouse traps, because we didn't want to kill the mice. But we were unsuccessful. We assumed they didn't like our peanut butter.
Then one night I woke up in the night to this terrible scratching coming from the wall at the head of our bed. It was TWO FEET from my head and it was scratching and running around. TOTALLY DISGUSTING. Still, I thought, maybe it was a squirrel on the roof and I just imagined it was in the wall in my sleepy state. So we continued to ignore the vermin. THEN, (sorry this is kind of a long story) I found large guinea pig sized turds on our washer and dryer and footprints the size of a dime. Seriously. I could see the little nails and pads and everything. Let me just say that rats must have very dirty feet to leave tracks like that. At this point, we knew it must be a rat, and I was starting to get scared. Mice I can deal with. Mice are nothing. Rats are a whole nother story. Besides, this was clearly a gigantic rat. Then that night Bob and I were sitting in the living room and we heard what must have been a HUGE creature making noises in the wall and ceiling and THEN the hugest scrabbling noise in our vent and we realized that the rat was right on the other side of the vent. Before we could make our move he was off and we heard him running in the heating vent under out floor and then down to the basement. . .
So, we decided that this rat was too big for us to catch in a trap and carry away to a field. Can you imagine HOLDING a rat the size of a guinea pig for any distance? It was too much for me. So we succumbed to the rat poison. Well, we didn't succumb. We succumbed to buying it. Bob set it out in the basement and went down five minutes later to get some laundry and the suckers had EATEN IT ALREADY. I'm feeling kind of guilty that they thought they had hit the rat food jackpot and we had betrayed them. If it were just Bob and me, maybe I would have let the rats share our space. But with Lilli I feel like, "what if they gave her some disease?" or "what if they tried to carry her off and eat her?" They were that big.
It all started when I was cleaning the plastic bags out of the cabinet under our sink. We just kept stuffing them under there when we went to the grocery store and we couldn't use it for actual storage anymore. So I decided to clean it out. Well, I stuck my hand in those bags, and it came out covered in rat pee. So of course I called Bob to finish the job :) Those rat(s) had shredded a bunch of the bags up and made a nest and it was soaked in pee and there were tons of droppings too. It was so gross, but more than that, it creeped me out that there had been a rat living under our sink! When I was doing dishes it was less than a foot from me! Well, at the time we thought it was a mouse, and I kind of think mice are cute, but it is still kind of creepy to think of other creatures making nests in your cabinets. So we went and got humane mouse traps, because we didn't want to kill the mice. But we were unsuccessful. We assumed they didn't like our peanut butter.
Then one night I woke up in the night to this terrible scratching coming from the wall at the head of our bed. It was TWO FEET from my head and it was scratching and running around. TOTALLY DISGUSTING. Still, I thought, maybe it was a squirrel on the roof and I just imagined it was in the wall in my sleepy state. So we continued to ignore the vermin. THEN, (sorry this is kind of a long story) I found large guinea pig sized turds on our washer and dryer and footprints the size of a dime. Seriously. I could see the little nails and pads and everything. Let me just say that rats must have very dirty feet to leave tracks like that. At this point, we knew it must be a rat, and I was starting to get scared. Mice I can deal with. Mice are nothing. Rats are a whole nother story. Besides, this was clearly a gigantic rat. Then that night Bob and I were sitting in the living room and we heard what must have been a HUGE creature making noises in the wall and ceiling and THEN the hugest scrabbling noise in our vent and we realized that the rat was right on the other side of the vent. Before we could make our move he was off and we heard him running in the heating vent under out floor and then down to the basement. . .
So, we decided that this rat was too big for us to catch in a trap and carry away to a field. Can you imagine HOLDING a rat the size of a guinea pig for any distance? It was too much for me. So we succumbed to the rat poison. Well, we didn't succumb. We succumbed to buying it. Bob set it out in the basement and went down five minutes later to get some laundry and the suckers had EATEN IT ALREADY. I'm feeling kind of guilty that they thought they had hit the rat food jackpot and we had betrayed them. If it were just Bob and me, maybe I would have let the rats share our space. But with Lilli I feel like, "what if they gave her some disease?" or "what if they tried to carry her off and eat her?" They were that big.
posted by mariko at 8:40 PM
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