The Rats Are Back

Once or twice a year we get rats in our backyard.

Luckily they stay outside and never come into the house – unlike those pesky mice against which we fought a protracted 2-year campaign some years ago that started with securing our food supply in sealed containers (the mice retaliated by changing their diet to cables and coated wires), sealing up several hundred large and small openings in the foundation and outside walls of our house, escalated to booby traps and trained dogs (it became quickly obvious that our dogs do not have mice-catching genes), and eventually ended with chemical weapons.

The mice lost.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t put dishes in the same cupboards as you store food.
  
• When you make a hole in the house to run a cable or wire, seal it up afterward!
  
• Cats are better than dogs at catching mice. In fact, dogs probably won’t even notice that you have mice.
  
• Don’t buy bird seed with millet in it.

The mice never came back.

But the rats do.

Two nights ago, The Big Guy spotted Ben’s great grandson, Big Ben, outside making friends with Andy. For some reason that we can’t fathom, neither Big Ben nor Andy recognized each other as mortal enemies. So they’re just checking each other out in the back yard under the bird feeder when The Big Guy opens the back door and tries to give Andy some explicit instructions about what dogs are supposed to do with rats.

With all the yelling going on, Big Ben figures it’s probably a good time to leave and, as The Big Guy explained it to me, he just waddled his fat self all the way across the back yard and climbed a tree. Andy exercised his keen hunting dog instincts by strolling after him sniffing out the rat trail the entire way to the tree.

Is this the same Andy who spends much of his mornings keeping watch out the front window just so that he can bark ferociously at the mail carrier, the UPS and FEDEX delivery guys and kids walking by on their way to school? What happened to the Andy who once actually caught and chomped on a squirrel. Where’s the Andy who will pursue any and all crows who enter our airspace?

I guess Big Ben somehow managed to reach his fully adult extra-large size without learning about traps. Last night, he came to a squished end.

Traps are set again tonight.

We’ll see if Big Ben has any relatives as stupid as he was.