Another One Bites The Dust

Last night, Big Ben's bigger brother, Bart, was the third casualty of this little war. The Big Guy's traps are having an unusually high success rate, 3 rats in 4 nights!

But I'm sure the rest will smarten up pretty soon. In the past, the casualty rate has tended to fall off steeply after the first couple of rats. I have a few ideas about why this may be so.

• The stupidest ones are all caught in the traps early on and the rest are too smart to get fooled no matter how much fresh peanut butter you smear on the trap triggers.


• Someone else's backyard becomes more attractive for some reason (Higher quality bird seed? Better smelling garbage? Fewer dogs?) and they move.


• After a few deaths, the word gets passed along to everybody that the wire and wood contraptions are dangerous and should be avoided even if they do smell like yummy, yummy food.

I'm sure there's some obscure municipal bylaw forbidding disposal of dead bodies in garbage. So far The Big Guy has three bodies double-wrapped in plastic and hidden deep in the depths of our garbage bags ready for pick up next week. At this rate, we may even accumulate a few more.

Here's a web site with some funny rat cartoons!

And www.ratkill.com has lots of rat eradication stories (some quite messy and gruesome) for those of you who don't have any fun rats to eradicate in your own backyard.