Rat Retreat

Part Two

Possession is nine-tenths of the law is an expression meaning that ownership is easier to maintain if one has possession of something, or difficult to enforce if one does not.

Wikipedia

So many of us have called rats “humanity’s most formidable foe” that it’s impossible to trace who might have been the first to give voice to that cri de coeur. They’re as successful as us at possessing what we claim as human habitats. I’m not talking about the sixty or so species of rat that keep their distance and do us no harm; I’m talking about rats:

… living in or near our buildings and feeding on our food, following us wherever we’ve settled. … There are just two main problem species: one is the black rat (R. rattus) which is also called the roof or house rat. The second, and by far the worse, is the brown rat (R. norvegicus) known as the Norway rat.

(Taken from a chapter on rats in Living Things We Love To Hate by Des Kennedy.)

As I said in ‘Rat Retreat’ part one, at present I’m battling an invasion by the roof or house rat. In New Zealand we often call it the ship rat, betraying the way it got to our shores by freeloading on sailing ships. The infestation is in a storage room that once upon a time served as a sleepout; situated on one of Little Owl Gully’s more secluded sites, we’d spend a day or two at ‘The Retreat’ when we needed some time out.

I know a slow and painful death from poison bait is a necessary evil in certain situations, but I’ve managed using alternative methods in all but one instance: subterranean rat tunnels started to appear near the hen house and run, and soon after I disturbed the scurrying and burrowing – in the deep litter of hen house sawdust – of about a dozen half-grown Norway rats. Blood up, I drove to the nearest farm supply store the very same day and got myself a container of rat poison blocks. Back home, I pushed a block or two down each hole.

When we humans leave food (as we so often do), where rats can get at it, who can blame them? A salutary lesson for me: I cleaned up my act and bought myself a hen feeder with a sturdy aluminium lid that remains shut until a hen steps on the feed platform and a lever mechanism lifts the lid – hen steps off and the lid comes down.

In the garage, I’ve got a live capture cage that I keep permanently set on a high up wall shelf which rats habitually use to move between their nests and food and water sources. Baiting it with peanut butter, I catch, in an average year, six to eight rats.

I decided to try that method in ‘The Retreat’. Rats, survival instincts finely tuned, like routes that keep them snucked up against a wall, and, creatures of habit, once they establish a pathway they’ll invariably use it from then on.

Sometimes you get the breaks: a very long trestle table resting on its side and creating an unobstructed rat run that went from near the back wall to almost as far as the door at the front. Convinced by the concentration of droppings and smear patches that it was indeed their habitual route, I added the novelty of an open cage. A curious mouse would immediately see it as novel and worth checking out – not so a cautious rat. It’s usual for a rat to skirt around a foreign obstacle for a few days, so, I fully expected to have to bide my time.

Taking the standard precaution, when handling the cage, of gloved hands to mask my human scent (rats have a highly developed sense of smell), I put a generous dollop of fresh peanut butter on the bait platform. Checking the trap these last two weeks became yet another addition to an already busy morning routine,

I still can’t quite believe my luck! One full-grown rat every night for the first six nights, nothing for the next two nights, then another two, followed by a gap of three nights before capturing my ninth rat.

You read about live capture traps being used for catch and release. I’ve read about people releasing the rats into the wild, well away from their domestic dwellings. Don’t know where that’s a good idea – certainly not in New Zealand where they threaten the very existence of so much of our native wildlife.

A single pellet from an air rifle, aimed between the rat’s eyes, kills the animal as swiftly and humanely as I possibly can. For good measure, I always fire a second pellet in the hope that it speeds up the death throes.

Half a jar of peanut butter used; nine rat carcasses buried in the compost heap – many more and I’ll risk exhuming one as I go to bury another. Still, once decomposed in the natural cycle of living things, they’ll contribute to the fertility of the vegetable garden. Now I couldn’t compost them, could I, if I’d used poison.

We were sick to the stomach when we discovered how bad it was up at ‘The Retreat’. The sense of relief is palpable now that I’ve got rid of the rats. The next step will be to put builder’s fill in all the spaces at the back of the roof where it is nailed to the back wall – gaps that at present are closed off by soft, moulded foam inserts that the rats have been chewing through to gain entrance to the room. I’ll also go over the entire exterior of the building to see whether there’s anywhere else they could get in. And not taking any chances, I’ll keep a trap permanently set in the room and check it every morning.

The last task will be nauseatingly hands-on: a thoroughgoing deep-clean of the room and everything we’ve stored in it. Even then, rats being rats, I think we’ll only ever feel confident in proclaiming ourselves nine-tenths in possession of a storage room that was once a sleepout we called ‘The Retreat’.

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