I SMELL A RAT

I take it as a good sign that Hub caught and killed the rat that had gotten into our garage recently.  We live on a wooded ravine and occasionally a mouse or two will find a way into the house in the winter. I'm not a screamer but it is a bit startling to see one scurry across the kitchen floor.  We generally can dispense with them in short order with a well placed trap.

But a rat is a whole different order of rodent.  I do not like rats. I had started to avoid the garage, filled with dread that I might see it and have to interact with it and also filled with anger that the thing was making me afraid in my own house.  We set traps for it that were ignored, or bait stolen with the trap undisturbed.  There seemed to be no stopping it.  We were on the verge of calling in the experts when last week I heard Hub in the garage amidst a racket of crashing and banging around and a gleeful shout of "Got him!"  I guess Hub had seen the thing sticking its nose out of its hiding place on the shelf, where it had eaten though several cartons of chicken stock -- what a mess!

As an aside, I'd like to offer a testament to my love for Son Two, demonstrated by my willingness to allow him to bring a "pet rat" home from the elementary school Science Fair back in the day.  Another student had raised a rat from infancy and Son Two thought this would be a brilliant and entertaining enterprise as well!  The kid had several babies to share, so we took one.  This was not a snowy white, pink-nosed "cute" rat.  It was a typical brown rat like you see hanging around dark alleys.  (His dad likely caught a couple in their garage!)  We put it in a big glass cage with a cushion of wood shavings, a wheel for exercise, a little bowl of water and food of some sort (Rat Chow?)  Occasionally we'd take it out and hold it but my breath would become rapid and shallow and my skin would crawl.  We never bonded and of course Son Two soon lost interest in the whole project. I was left to care for it.  If we'd had Google back then I'd have been looking up "life expectancy for rats".  Ours lived about two years, until a tumor of some kind prevented it from moving around the cage.  Being a compassionate soul, I made Hub take it to the vet to be euthanized. The vet laughed, "That's a first!"  They charged him ten bucks and got a good story out of it.

The rat in our garage didn't get a humane injection send off.  I understand now that a shovel to the head works just as well and as quickly. I'm glad the rat is gone.

Which reminds me of politics.  I am emerging from my fog of grief and rage.  I'm still not pleased about what has gotten into the White House, but my fear and dread are starting to be tempered by the laying of traps.  The ACLU took out a full page ad in the NY Times this week promising to fight every possible human rights violation.  President Obama has said, as a private citizen,  he will speak out against actions counter to American values.  Democrats and Independents are ready to step into the fray in Congress and in State Houses.  Many people are voicing a renewed (or brand new) commitment to civic engagement, politics, and activism.  We may have to follow the droppings left behind by the growing number of miscreants overrunning our government to root them out of their nests, but I am growing more confident we can persevere and perhaps control the damage they might create by their insistence on gnawing through the Constitution.

Science Fair lesson learned:  Never invite a rat into your home.  The one who initially wanted it will discover it's not all its cracked up to be and the one who hated it from the beginning will be left to deal with it.  I recommend a nice glass cage where it can be contained on the inside looking out.

At least, that's the view from here...©