Oh Rats!

Three things about rats….

First, in New York rat hunting is a sport. The hunting ground is a dim, grimy alley in lower Manhattan where a bunch of dogs go pawing through mounds of garbage in search of rats at their owners’ behest. The group’s organizers claim that sending the dogs scrambling after vermin is viable exercise for the animal’s centuries-old skills, think fox hunting, and they have been doing it for the last ten years. The dogs work together and they do catch and kill rats although there is no official estimate of how many they have rid the city of. The Health Department declined to comment on the hunts.

Next, in China there has been a crackdown on a ring of meat suppliers that are claiming they are selling lamb but instead selling rat meat. I've blogged in the past about horsemeat for human consumption but that doesn't begin to compare to the idea of rat meat for human consumption. My husband and I plan to take a trip to China some day and I think we will be going vegetarian when we do.

Finally, I share one of my own experiences with rats in my chicken coop.  The so called coop that is home to our half a dozen hens is really a large plastic storage shed tall enough for me to stand in with a set of double doors that almost span the front of the shed. When the weather isn't cold I never close those doors but instead let the girls roam free. The perk for me is that I don’t have to get up with the sun the following morning to let the girls out. One night the thermometer was below the 40 degree mark and the doors would need to be closed. In the dark I counted 6 chicken shadows hens huddled on the roost together for warmth. I reached for the galvanized pail that when inverted doubled as a cover for their feeder. I placed it over the feeder and twisted it a little to make sure there was no gap between it and the Rubbermaid floor of the coop. Then I backed out to close the doors. The right door closed easily but the left gathered up leaves and pine needles as it swept to where the doors met in the middle. There was a gap but I pushed and turned the handle secure the door even with the gap. The girls had already been out long after dark in the cold so rather than kick the detritus out of the way I did a poor job of closing the doors. I was tired and my next stop was to be my bed. So I turned from the coop to make my way back to the house when a pounding and trembling began against inside of the coop doors. I turned and stood stunned thinking it seemed like I might have closed an unseen person up in the coop who was now trying desperately to escape. Then just as quickly as that thought popped into my head, a pair of rats squeezed out from the gap in the mostly closed doors. The two rats big as squirrels raced up and across the coop roof jumping nimbly to an overhanging horizontal oak limb where they continued to race into the darkness of the night canopy. By the time I was able to move they’d disappeared into the darkness.

I managed to trap the rats over the weeks that followed. And to his credit, my dog, Fred a rat terrier mix, managed to kill one in a late evening foray. I also moved the chicken feeder out of the coop and ended my practice of scattering chicken scratch on the ground.

Oh rats! You are not my favorite animals.