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D R A M A_ Q U E E N
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T A B L E_T A L K
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R E C E N T L Y Kiddie pants or kiddie porn? Lost in the supermarket Why I didn't report my rape Small massacres The walls around the garden BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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BRING IN 'DA NOISE, BRING IN 'DA RAT KILLERS | PAGE 1, 2
"Rats, rats and more rats. Boy, everyone's got 'em this year," said the woman who picked up at Critter Control. "We are getting so many calls. It must be El Niño." Like males under age 18, El Niño gets the blame for everything bad. "All that water last year," she explained. "That means rats this year." It also meant that she couldn't "send out a man" to do an inspection for at least a week. The inspection would cost $100. "What do we do till then?" I asked. "Are you squeamish? You could set traps yourself and save money. We charge $80 for each rat we get." "Traps?" I asked. "Put them where you find droppings. You'll see them. Some places -- whoa! -- it gets as thick as bat guano." "But your ad says humane," I try. I'm not sure what I expected: eviction notices, maybe. The Critter Control woman really wanted to be helpful. "I'll tell you what you shouldn't do. You shouldn't use poison. It can cause all kinds of problems when you have something dead sealed up in a wall." Having a pest problem is like having a sexual fetish. You think you're alone. But just mention yours and everyone wants to tell you theirs. One friend went into more detail than I wanted about an invasion of fleas. Another friend used every known synonym for "vomit" to describe the smell of the dead possum in her chimney. A neighbor held his hands a foot-length apart: "The rat was this big! This big!" "I'll handle it," my husband said. I should mention here that my husband is a writer and his father is a minister. But his great-grandmother -- old family photos show a craggy-faced bootlegging type -- earned her living trapping muskrats for Sears-Roebuck company. My husband, flush with purpose and genetic pride, hurried off to Ace Hardware and came back with five old-fashioned rattraps, the kind that always got Moe, Larry and Curly by the nose. "They go crazy over peanut butter -- the crunchy kind!" my husband reported. "Now, I have to think like a rat. Where would a rat go?" He placed the baited traps under the deck, in the garage, by the dryer vent. Evidently, rats can mash themselves down and squeeze in anywhere. He found a gnawed-up sky blue crayon in the kids' secret hiding place ("Maybe not-so-secret!"). He placed the final trap by the crawl space under the house. Rats have been known to shinny up plumbing pipes. Over the next few days, I knew that my son and daughter were surreptitiously setting off the traps, but I didn't call them on it. One morning, a trap was actually missing, although the kids swear up and down they didn't touch that one. My husband, puzzled and increasingly respectful of rat intelligence, grew depressed about his manhood: "If I were trapping for a living, we'd all be starving to death." The children begged and pleaded for rat clemency. We went on the Internet and sent out several group messages asking for eradication alternatives. There's a world of rat lovers out there. The Rat and Mouse Gazette is full of "cute and informative rat stories." On personal Web sites, we found photos of tiny rat faces peering Anne Geddes-style out of fields of daisies. There's the Rat and Mouse Club of America with its "Squeak Rooms." We immediately heard back from Virginia, Lisa and Bill who applauded our efforts to "think twice about killing an animal others consider vermin ... Putting out traps or boxes of poison just victimizes individuals -- usually an inexperienced little baby out for its first romp." They recommended all the preventive measures we had already taken: removing potential food supplies (nuts, acorns, yummy snails), putting tight lids on garbage cans, cutting back rose bushes that cling to the side of the house, trimming the tree so rats can't go swinging onto the roof like superheroes. "You must find where the rats are actually entering the building and put dense hardware cloth mesh (Not window screen -- 'Ha! Ha! Ha! I eat that for breakfast' -- Representative Rat Person)." And then, we were let in on a dirty little secret. Don't ever bait! the message warned us. It seems that rats lay down a urine trail that tells other rats, "Free buffet this way. Follow me." It doesn't matter if the trail ends in death; that information is not in the rat urine message. The e-mail explained: "For the few that you succeed in killing, the hordes will follow. It is a well-kept secret in the rat-kill industry. Why? Because it is like drugs -- a little leads to a lot. What I mean is, an exterminator who puts out bait and produces one or two occasional dead rats is just guaranteeing a permanent customer (sucker!)." So what do we do with the rats in our walls? Virginia and Lisa and Bill were a lot less clear about that. They discouraged us from making them a part of the family. "I've heard of babies being tamed and raised as pets, but I'm not sure if the adults could be tamed. After all, they are wild animals. It would probably be much better to release them somewhere far enough away from your house that they can't return." And how do we do that? "Peanut butter and live traps. But that's a pretty hard thing to pull off." We were back to the beginning. My husband and I had a hard talk with the kids. We didn't see any other choice. We didn't like it either, but the rats had to die. Everything is killing something else all the time. Something lives; something else has to die. Rats kill snails. Vegetarians kill plants. With every breath, we kill bacteria. That's the way life is. My husband kept up his diligence with the traps. My son stopped disarming them. My daughter stopped giving her father dirty looks. We had all accepted the inevitable. One morning when the kids were in school, my husband announced, "Got one! Come see." He was triumphant -- not a lick of sympathy, a dutiful cat that deposits a battered bird carcass at its master's feet. The rat's eyes were open, but it was seriously dead. The fur was actually quite beautiful. I never knew rat pelt had an orange underbelly, like the time I tried Sun-In on my brown hair. We considered having a burial ceremony when the kids got home, the kind of modern parenting event that we held when pet turtles died or when we found a hairless baby bird fallen out of its nest. But that afternoon, my daughter had gymnastics after school and the next day my son had tae kwon do. Three days seemed excessive to keep a dead rat on ice. My husband dropped it into the garbage can and reset the trap. When we told the kids that we had caught a rat, they were, to our surprise, not particularly upset. At first, we were proud of their maturity, their acceptance of what we had called the natural order of things. Then I felt something nagging at me. I guess I preferred their whining and outrage, their sabotage, their impractical empathy. With their compliance, we all seemed somehow lesser. Three days, three more dead rats. And then silence in the walls.
And that's it. The story of the rats. I suppose it would have been
nicer if everything ended with some miracle solution where rat and human
found a way to peacefully co-exist. But the truth, as truth often is,
was a lot messier.
Jill Wolfson is a coauthor of "Somebody Else's Children: The Courts, the Kids, and the Struggle to Save America's Troubled Families," and she reviews books for the San Jose Mercury News. She lives in San Jose, Calif.
The Rat Bite A welfare mother's tragicomic tale of life in the system
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