A Very Handsome Rat

From up here in the lookout tower, the people walking down Jefferson Avenue to my north, and Tenth Street to my west, look like scurrying rats. I'd call that an improvement, and I'm not trying to insult anybody by saying that. I like rats.

Last week, Kathe and I began to hear in our kitchen the unmistakable sounds of little teeth gnawing on something hard and woody. We checked for signs of intrusion in our foodstuffs and didn't find any, and hoped that it was merely a rat or squirrel chewing open nuts in the crawlspace under the house.

We wouldn't have minded that much. We'd eventually have had to go under and block up whatever access the critter had opened, but there was no rush, most likely, so long as the critter or critters didn't come into the kitchen itself.

Then we did find the bread bags torn open, and rat turds in the bottom of a drawer, and knew we had a problem to deal with. So, we dealt with it.

The bread and other food items in that section of the kitchen were all removed to other locations, and replaced by blocks of poisoned food.

We hated to do it. Rats are charming animals. Attractive to look at, intelligent, good parents, &c., but alas, they are too much like us to make good neighbors: they like the same kind of food, they find our houses comfortable, they carry the same diseases. So we gritted our teeth and put out the baits.

Today we found an especially large, especially handsome rat in the back yard, quite dead. He had a beautiful brown coat, a well-formed intelligent-looking head, absolutely the prettiest rat I'd seen in a long time.

We could never have befriended him, though. It takes generations of selection for gentleness and submissiveness before rats are domesticated enough to keep as pets. Still a shame to have to kill him.

Since he wasn't one of *our* rats, we buried him in the compost heap instead of the pet cemetary, but the incident has increased our resolve to build a new rat cage and buy at least a pair of rats. It's been too long since we had any rats of our own.