Rat!

Resolute rodent pushes carer to the edge....

Image : iStock

Here’s the thing about rats. They mess with your head. You lie awake in the silence of the night, listening. A scratch, a scrape, a scurry… Or worse, the sound of wallpaper being stripped from the wall behind the radiator in grandma’s bedroom. It seems rats may be addicted to vintage wallpaper paste.

Suddenly, one fateful day at dawn, no scratch nor scrape nor scurry, but a huge crash. Down the mezzanine spiral stair tumbled two electronic multimeters followed by… one large rat. What this rat wanted with two of my multimeters defied explanation. The more pressing issue was that all three were now on our bedroom floor.

Now, this was not the rotund, easily trappable, lumbering sort of rat from the nearby farm that I occasionally catch on camera raiding peanuts from a bird feeder at the end of the garden.

Oh no… this rat was athletic, savvy, and nimble.

Billy is our geriatric Jack Russell Terrier. He sleeps in our bedroom. He went hyper, tail wagging furiously. “I’ve got this!”, he barked, in hot pursuit of our uninvited intruder.

Our Billy is 15. His diminishing faculties and teeth deficiency would severely hamper his ability to conclude the inevitable confrontation. So I restrained the little fella. The elusive intruder legged it into the hallway.

Care-giving is stressful at the best of times. Every challenge large or small is yours to resolve. I cope with belligerent boilers, dripping taps, frosted freezers, leaky roofs, poorly dogs, resentful residents, even the adversarial medical receptionist. But the war of wits with this resolute rodent tested me right to the edge.

Do we need a van pitching up outside with “Rat Whisperer Rodent Control” or suchlike emblazoned down the sides for everyone to see? Not if I could help it. Thoughts focussed on more discreet solutions - traps, different types of traps… or just maybe… poison:-

1. Humane cage trap… If this wily rat has any notion that “humane” implies a promise of a pleasant release in the delightful Lancashire countryside, he has another thing coming - in the form of an early bath, a deep one.

2. Jumbo sized Nipper trap… Might work if I can get the knack of setting the sprung bar to a delicate hair trigger without dislocating a finger. Otherwise the crafty culprit will abscond with peanut or medium cheddar, leaving the unsprung trap looking ridiculous and no rat to be seen. And crunchy peanut butter has been a major disappointment, turning so watery I could not imagine any self-respecting rodent fancying it.

3. Poison blocks and bait stations… yep! That should do it. Traps deal with one rodent at a time. A bait station can despatch several in one night. The downside is need to ensure no poisoned victims are left exposed for other animals.

Billy may be geriatric, but his sniffer faculties are fully intact. With tail still awag, he showed me exactly where the rat had gone. The rodent fled from the hallway into my mother’s bedroom. She likes to sleep with her bedroom door ajar so I can hear if she calls out in the night.

I felt truly awful. There were 4 inches of rat’s tail exposed from below the radiator edge, but we had no other bedroom to which to evacuate her. I lied. The following morning I explained that the trap shenanigans were to catch a mouse which had come in from the fields.

Hide and seek was not this rat’s forte. Its tell-tale tail remained exposed the following morning. To my shame, I wasn’t brave enough to grab it, even with gloved hand. I tried to trap the tail at arm’s length with a sprung plastic clamp, and failed miserably. The sensitive tail flicked upwards and the rat scurried away behind a chest of drawers.

Later that day, I noticed that the rat had been trying to scratch an escape route in the hall floor, into the subspace below. So I removed a couple of the evidence-bearing parquet blocks to aid the culprit’s task.

I hear you ask:- “Why let the rat into the floor subspace?” Well, four reasons. This destination was far preferable to grandma’s bedroom. I could lay bait stations and poison blocks down there without harming Billy. A deceased (albeit smelly) corpse would remain safely away from other animals. And it took the some of the immediate pressure off me.

Rat terminated. Crisis over.

And now, each morning, I check grandma’s bedroom floor for any new fragments of wallpaper that may have fluttered down from behind the radiator…

Thank you very much for reading COPING WITH CARING.

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Sad postscript. I was by my mother Yvonne’s side in a hospital cubicle when she died, just two weeks away from her 102nd birthday. A pulsating aorta gave way. After 42 years apart she has rejoined her beloved husband Tom who passed in 1983. I cared for Yvonne for five years. I still care for my wife who has multiple sclerosis.