Might as well know this about me. I don’t think death is the worst thing. At least, my feelings about it are ambivalent, and vary with the circumstance. Humane deaths are a good thing. Being able to euthanize a beloved pet is a good thing. Dispatching a rat humanely, a rat with the poor judgment to come inside my house, does not bother me.
Doesn’t mean I’m good at it.
So I have set a snap trap. I am enjoying my morning coffee when it occurs to me to glance over at my trap. It isn’t there. It is a few inches away, under the sofa. It had worked. I did the only thing I could think of. I texted my friend Pat in all caps.
PAT PAT PAT I CAUGHT A RAT RAT RAT OMG WHAT NOW HELP
“Congratulations,” Pat texted.
WILL YOU COME OVER AND GET RID OF IT FOR ME
Well. I didn’t think it was too much of an ask. Pat is only about a half hour from my house if traffic is light. Pat has boarded whaling ships on the open seas and chained herself to the harpoon. Pat has been arrested for piracy. Pat could totally unsnap my rat, bag it, drop it in my garbage can, and be back home with her feet up in time for afternoon tea, is what I was thinking.
46 years ago I was sitting in the living room of my new house, talking on the phone with my friend Katie, when I saw a tiny mouse dash across the floor in the kitchen. I was two years out from my lab job at which I personally dispatched hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of mice, with my bare hands, for shit wages, so my reaction was predictable. I screamed like a little girl and pulled my feet up on the couch. One wild house mouse had turned me into a cartoon character. I’m not proud of this, or all the prior mouse dispatchment, either.
Katie was wise. “Okay,” she said, smoothly, after I quit screaming into the receiver, “I want you to walk into that kitchen. You walk right in there and look around and then come back and tell me you’ve done it.” The phone was attached to the wall on a leash then, children. Look it up.
Anyway, Katie wanted to make sure I could still get to the beer refrigerator. That is a true friend.
Soon enough I learned how to set traps. And unsnap the results. I believe the next stage of my road to maturity involved cleaning up after myself so the entire mousedom of Portland wasn’t booking tours in my house.
But I had a serious lack of interest in disposing of this rat.
Pat texted ideas and suggestions. Rubber gloves. A rod to slip under the snappy part so it doesn’t get my finger. Throwing away the rat, trap and all. (I’m too cheap for that.) I wasn’t paying attention: I had ideas too. They involved getting a neighbor. Or calling the fire department. The fireman would have to bend over to do the deed, I’m thinking. I’m thinking hard.
The thing is, if my neighbor came over and said she couldn’t bring herself to unsnap a dead rat, I would totally go over there with a plastic bag and roll my eyes and take care of it like a big girl. I know this. But this was my rat. My rat would suddenly come to life as soon as I touched the trap. My rat would shriek and then I would launch it into space. I decided to not think about my rat, because maybe somebody would drop by later.
No one dropped by later.
Pat commenced sending me a series of AI-generated pictures of rats in heaven, an exercise she characterized as “helping.” She said she’d be happy to do the deed herself, except that then she’d end up in a blog post.
Heh heh.
Finally I pulled myself together, pretended I was my own neighbor, rolled my eyes at myself, and popped the rat into a plastic bag and out to the garbage can. It was a very handsome rat. I didn’t think to check the sex, so it will have to be a “they.” And I can tell people I caught them and took them out to the garbage, and people will think I dispatched a bunch of them.
Like a big girl.
Happy No Fear, Murr.
My Achilles’ Heel is spiders. Which means I have eight Achilles’ Heels, I think? Most days I can get by with a pint glass and a postcard (as in using said implements to remove the spider, not as in getting drunk, going on holiday and sending the offending arachnid a photo of somewhere sunny – but I could warm to that idea). Unmost days (for that, read “catches me unawares with rapid scampering”), they get many postcards all at once at great velocity… ok, it’s a heavy book. I feel less bad about this nowadays, after discovering that a few of my favourite natural history authors have ‘fessed up to their struggles with spiders – David Quammen and Simon Barnes – although their versions are much more heroic than mine.
More on topic, I’m currently in a battle of wits (and I don’t think I’m winning) with a small rodent that is pinching the peanut butter bait from a trap, without setting it off.
Graeme, you made me laugh out loud. I, too, use the glass and card method, usually. Just Monday night, I sent a remarkably fat cricket out into the cold night air that way. But I don’t get many postcards, so my cards are usually in the form of junk mail. That I have in abundance.
Oh, I love spiders! I have an agreement with them: they stay off the floor, and I’ll stay off the ceiling and walls. Some really big ones I will take outside (I have a dedicated bug-catcher that I got long ago via a catalog. Clear plastic pyramid with a sliding door base and a handle at the apex.) Others I leave be. I especially love jumping spiders. When you see a magnified photo of them, they look like 8-legged teddy bears! So cute! I even had one perch on my finger once. (He was heading toward the floor, which is clearly not in our agreement.) Most spiders have very poor eyesight, despite the fact that they have so many eyes. Jumping spiders are the exception. They have great vision, and can lift up their heads to look at you. How cute is that?
My agreement with the black widows is: They stay out of the house, and I never stick my fingers under the edge of the stucco outside. That has worked for three and a half decades, but the garage is still disputed territory. I have had only one meeting with a jumping spider, on a leaf in our front yard. It stayed still long enough for me to snap a picture, then ran to the underside of the leaf so vast I didn’t even see it move. Suddenly it was just there.
A former friend studied the problem of mice pinching the trap bait and concluded that the bait needed to be so firmly attached that the mouse had to yank it to try to get it off. This had the desired effect of pinching the mouse. His preferred bait was bacon tied to the bait pan. Mine is to smoosh a raisin into the curl on the back of the pan and coat it with peanut butter. Works fairly well.
I can be startled by the really zippy spiders if I’m not expecting them, but in our family my dad liked to photograph spiders and webs, we were instructed to admire them–a much more fraught activity when you’re very nearsighted and no one has corrected it yet. Anyway I later learned my father trained himself to appreciate the beauty of spiders because he had always been afraid of them too. I guess he got over it. And yes, jumping spiders are plumb adorable.
I haven’t had much trouble with critters getting away with the peanut butter. I did note, BTW, that rat traps are a LITTLE less scary to set, because there’s more room to get the little bar under the snapinator. However, if one DID mess up…much worse.
We’ve had bunch of mice lately. Hubs wasn’t reacting with the due alacrity I thought the situation required, so I set the snap traps myself and even emptied one of them.
I also ordered the black plastic traps that were mentioned here last week.
ugh
I’m just using the plain Victor wooden numbers. Cheap.
A former friend hired me to kill rats on his farm. It was a hobby farm on new soil, so finding the rat burrows wasn’t an issue. I just dug them up and chopped up the rats with a shovel as they exited. Worked fine with the juveniles but the adult the size of a groundhog got away.
My brother’s kids earned the title of Mouse/Rat Killers supreme. The guest bedroom was in the basement and after listening to mouse races all night, I complained to my brother. His solution was to send his children up into the suspended ceiling and pay them a bounty for every mouse killed. At the next visit, the guest bedroom was silent.
The kids then figured out that if they reached up inside the walls of the chicken coop they could grab the tails of rats, yank them out and bash their brains out.
When my brother came home from work he discovered a 55 gallon drum filled to the brim with rats and the children still hard at work. I asked if they weren’t afraid of being bitten and they just gave me this look like, uncle dear, we had no idea what a shrinking violet you are.
Sounds like the kids might be were-cats! Yowza!
So. It’s genetic, huh.
Actually you lost me at “My former friend…”
What was the issue with the former friend statement?
Oh! Nothing special, just implies Something Happened that made it former.
And a happy rodent-free new year to everyone!
As I was reading the blog and responses, I thought about all the beloved cartoon characters that are mice (or, less frequently, rats) — Mickey & Minnie mouse, Mighty Mouse, Jerry (of Tom & Jerry fame), Remy (the rat cook in Ratatouille), Speedy Gonzales, Stuart Little, the singing mice in Babe, and the best of them all, Pinky & the Brain. I got curious and found that the site “Ranker” lists the 65 greatest mice as ranked by fans, with a similar list of 20+ rats!
I’m feeling some cognitive dissonance over our revulsion of rodents in our homes and the way we adore them as cute characters in cartoons and movies. I’ll leave it to the psychotherapists to figure that one out.
Have a great 2025 Murr, Dave and all the posters.
P.S. …how could I have forgotten Ben the rat (think Michael Jackson)!
Cartoon rodents don’t seem to have fleas or digestive systems (at least not the out-going end of said systems).
My absolute favorite is the character just known as Rat in the comic strip Pearls Before Swine by Stephen Pastis. I can identify with Rat so much! Pessimistic. Check. Sarcastic. Check. Drinks quite a bit. Check.
Ooo! Ooo! I got one! Templeton the rat!
Yes! Templeton, from Charlotte’s Web. There’s also Rizzo the rat from the Muppets.
Have you seen Postmodern Jukebox’s torch-singer cover of the Pinky and the Brain theme? It’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqMs9WsJg2k
Brilliant! Thanks for the link
“The phone was attached to the wall on a leash then, children. Look it up.”
A propos of nothing rodent- or arachnid-related: this phrase made me think of the simple pleasure we enjoyed that young adults will probably never: the sound of the intake of air and the fresh smell that hit your nose when the can opener broke the seal on a new can of ground coffee. Nothing like it!
Funny where the brain goes when let off its leash! Happy new year, everyone!
“So unbeatable, it’s reheatable!” “Chock Full ‘Nuts is the Heavenly Coffee” and all that.
Happy Year of the Rat. I mean Wood Dragon. Try catching and dispatching one of those!
I quit using the brand of mousetrap that has a pair of coil springs when I found a mouse just outside the garage with its foot caught in the spring. It had dragged the trap out of the garage and died of exposure in the cold rain. Definitely not the humane kill I’d expected. My hands are not steady enough anymore for a wooden Victor trap, so now I use the plastic-and-metal Victor Easy-Set.
One of my backyard traps caught a rat by the butt, and it was still quite alive when I checked my trap line and found it. I had no long blades (machete length, I was thinking) available to dispatch the poor sucker. I wouldn’t use a short blade, as I have never forgotten the day in the pharmaceutical testing lab when I tried to anesthetize a Sprague-Dawley with a shot of phenobarbitol to the abdomen and she climbed right up the syringe and bit me. So I used the sharp end of a long broken wooden garden stake. That was as awful as one might think, maybe more so. I swore that if that ever happens again, I will buy a compressed-air pellet gun just for that purpose, but since then I’ve had nothing but clean kills. I did kill a starling with one, and I hope that does not happen again.
A few years ago I bought an electrocution trap, baited it with peanut butter, and ended up killing one of our adorable squirrels. I threw the trap away. I know someone who has had so much trouble with squirrels that such an event might not bother her, though.
Holy cow! I feel like such a wimp because having just gotten rid of an infestation of ants in my kitchen over Christmas I saw one lonely aunt wandering across the counter… On that note I will be off to bed to rest up for battle tomorrow. Happy New Year!
We dispatched a series of pack rats that we caught in an “live trap” each night at a remote cabin.
Trap into garbage bag – garbage bag attached to car exhaust with Velcro strap, run engine until rat expires, feed rat to local Northern Harrier circling our field!!
OMG Murr, this rodent theme of yours has unleashed such an extensive thread of comments! Here in DC, it was very fashionable for neighbors to chip in together and buy dry ice, in sert pieces into burrows and seal them up. I think that the only person who benefitted from that exercise was the local Harris-Teeter supermarket that sold everyone the dry ice.
Fortunately, our Nation’s Capitol recognizes that we have a little vermin problem, and so the “Rodent & Vector Control” crew will come by *on demand* and at no cost, and puff their magic deadly prescription-only powder into burrows for us. (As a taxpayer, I appreciate having at least one city service that works well.)
And don’t forget Roquefort, the mouse detective, in The Aristocats, voiced by by Sterling Holloway.
Good job, Murr. But you are seriously cheap. The times I have dealt with mouse traps, the whole operation is in the bag and out the door. I’m with Graeme. When I was giving tours and introducing visitors to the animal kingdom at Lincoln Park Zoo the one thing I absolutely refused to do was the golden orb spider enclosure. No way I was turning my back on that to face the public. It wasn’t really an enclosure, more of an open small closet housing 8′ x 10′ webs of 5 inch diameter spiders. In theory, they stayed put because that’s where they ate and drank. in reality, on occasion, I encountered keepers searching the safari house for them. Naked mole rats on the other hand? What was God thinking? Probably “I can do better than day 6. Hmmm, let me think…” It’s curious how we react to other creatures on the planet. Spiders do it for me- I’ve handled and felt completely comfortable with everything else. I can totally see you dispatching mice for beer money. Reward yourself with a really fine brew for your rat.
Dispatching mice in our department was very clean and neat. Pick mouse up by tail, let it grab onto a test-tube holder, and it will pull away, and you put a pencil or forceps or something on the neck and pull the tail. Snap!
However if we needed a “whole-body homogenate,” we had to drop them in an Osterizer. Did not love that. And the few rats we used? Nuh-uh. Would not do what was required.