Rats? Not in the house, please

Am I the only one who was happy to hear the news that St. John’s is the home of choice for a proportionately large population of rats? Well, no, I do know of one other; Janine.

How, you might well ask, is this good news? Well, if your back, or front yard has sometimes seemed like a condo development for the furry critters and nobody else you know has neighbours of this calibre, or admits they have, you start to feel a little ashamed, like somehow it’s your fault. You are attracting rats, maybe not you personally, but your property is. The blame lies with your birdfeeders or your compost pile and the not-always-unspoken opinion is that nobody with any standards would feed birds or make compost.

From somewhere in her studies or on her travels, Daughter # 1 passed on the interesting fact that we are never more than 10 feet away from a rat. I’m not sure if this statistic was confined to cities or included two legged rats, but it does beg the question of are we really handling rats the right way.

Here is the Janice and Janine approach to rats. We will not tolerate them in the house, but as long as they know their place is outdoors, we do not hate them. We do not hate squirrels and as a friend of mine once put it, squirrels are just rats with good P.R. In fact if I had to choose between squirrels and rats as roommates I would have a problem. Squirrels are cuter, but if they move into your house they can do way more damage than rats. Just ask Newman about the winter that squirrels took up residence in his house in Eastport. They tested the stuffing of comforters and pillows and anything else they could find, knocked over things, broke antique dishes and peppered the whole house with dropping. Perhaps they tried to avoid doing the latter because there were shreds of toilet paper all over the house. We could have hired rat exterminators all year round for the cost of cleaning and repairing after the cute little squirrels.

My first sighting on Fleming Street was half way up a climbing rose over the back porch. It was winter and I had a bird feeder on that rose so I could enjoy the birds up close and personal. From the living room I thought, ‘that is a different bird’ and realized as I got closer that it was a rat. He, she, it would grab a seed and scurry back down the cane and disappear under the porch through a hole in the snow. It was kind of like what they say watching a cobra is like; I was horrified and fascinated at the same time. Up and down it went while behind glass two feet away I couldn’t tear myself away. I was actually admiring the colour of its coat.

Newman started trapping them. He’d be out checking his traps just like he was selling to the Hudson Bay Co. He trapped 11 but after one horrible not-quite-dead incident, did a bit of research on the web and came up with a concoction that will not harm your pets but will drive the rats away.

It worked for us so then he put some down for Janine’s backyard tenants. No more back yard sightings. However, shortly after that, she was gazing out the front window one day while on the phone and up popped a rat from a hole in the snow under a big bush not three feet away. Unmindful of the person on the other end of the phone, she squealed “Oh my God, a rat.” Subsequent gazing revealed another adult rat and at least three young ones, probably relocated from the back, courtesy of Newman’s Humane Pest Control Service. We’d stand in the window and watch the little creatures scurrying back and forth to the sunflower seed husks.

Newman drove them away, but between the rat family, the birds, and the squirrels, last winter at Janine’s was like an episode of Wild Kingdom. Sort of.

But neither of us had one in the house.