So, you may have noticed the cute little icons now positioned squarely above my ranting space here. They are there to keep score of the number of rats that have been dispatched in my apartment. More specifically, my pantry. On the third shelf up.
We’ve enjoyed a quiet, yet slightly strained peace with the varmint that had apparently made a home somewhere in the great mysterious places that they do such things. We were content to completely ignore him as long as he left our food and such alone, and he seemed content to remind us that we should never, ever leave a bag of garbage on the floor — we, being too lazy to bring it out to the dumpster after yanking it from the can and putting a fresh bag in it’s place — by eating a hole in the side and dragging a few pieces of said trash out to nibble on.
When it first happened, I made a complaint to the apartment powers that be. In their infinite, unquestionable wisdom, they rapidly dispatched a crack squad of Death Mexicans to promptly squirt liquid foam in a few of the holes they half-heartedly looked for. And when I say that they looked for them, I mean they really got busy opening the two doors under the sink and calling it a day. I slept better that night, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that our apartment was now locked up tighter than a hummingbird’s tweet… a real Fort Knox constructed entirely of Jell-O, proof against even the mightiest of rodents. If it was really, really tired. Or dead. Maybe.
So, we turned a blind eye and hoped for the best, even seeing our little houseguest as a cute little feller that would scurry under the dishwasher when we wandered into the kitchen. Until, that is, we found that several baggies and boxes of food in the pantry had been chewed into and panty-raided in the night by that furry rapscallion. This, as they say in the industry, was war.
I went out and bought a trap… but not just any trap mind you. I’m a technical boy living in a digital world, and frankly I love gadgets. I stood there in the Isle Of Doom at the local Home Depot, staring at all the medieval devices used to dispatch creatures great and small (where was all this when I was bitching about my neighbor playing his stereo too loud while I was trying to sleep?). I was wondering if I could deal with the nastiness of a spring trap that may not kill the thing outright — or worse snap a piece of it off, making a hell of a mess. How about the squeal of a rodent caught in a glue trap, slowing starving to death. Poisons aren’t really all that effective in the strength you can buy from home improvement stores (oh, how I miss Barber Labs in NOLA!), and if they do work, you end up with a dead rat in the walls making a stink.
Then I saw it, and I swear there was a shaft of light shining down upon what I had been searching for without even knowing it. The Victor Electronic Rat Trap. Now, I wasn’t sure at this point if we had a rat or a mouse, but my roomies had described it as being about three-ish inches long. Big enough for this baby. It was a bit pricy at $39, but what the hell, I had to have it. No sir, no analog traps for me.
Now this trap is, for all practical purposes, a taser in a rat-sized housing. When you turn it on there is about a five second hum… that would be the capacitors charging up from the four C batteries it uses. There are three metal plates in the floor of it, and when the critter stands on two of them he becomes the last part of the circuit and ZAP! he gets the full charge and his heart and brain stop working so well. He is instantly killed, in what is billed as the most humane method on the market today. No slow death from poison or a poorly snapped trap and no tortuous starvation in a glue trap. No muss, no fuss, and the trap is infinitely reusable. My only concern was if I was going to be able to convince a rat to climb in this sucker, regardless of the bait I used.
The bait of recommended choice from Victor is peanut butter. A small dab of it in the back of the trap should be enough. We also found that the varmints are crazy-go-nuts for sunflower seeds — removed from the shell, of course — owing to the fact that the bag in the pantry was chewed into, and there were remnants of the seeds everywhere. I had initially placed the trap on the floor along the baseboard leading to the panty, but GonzO had the genius to put it on the shelf in the pantry, at the scene of the crime. I added a couple of seeds just outside the trap opening, a couple of seeds in the peanut butter, and a seed or two in the middle of the trap.
This my friends was the magic combination, and we had our first victim that night as we slept. Deader than Jimmy Hoffa, we found a rat (not a cute little mouse, oh no) in our contraption… clean and exterminated. We re-set the bait and trap thinking that maybe, just maybe, there may be another one creeping about — an accomplice as GonzO put it. We were not disappointed. Not one, but two rats died at our hands the next night; GonzO happened into the kitchen on the way outside for one final smoke and noticed the corpse in the trap, cleaned it and re-set the trap, and another had bit the dust by the time we woke the next morning.
Let me tell you, this was the best forty bones I’ve ever spent on pest control. I heartily recommend it to all you faithful readers out there. It’s the best entertainment money can buy.
So, now I need to go and file another complaint with the apartment folks. This time, however, I’m going armed with (as of this writing) two dead rats in zip-loc baggies. I decided that after the second rat, any more that I collected would be disposed of in the manager’s office. If I was going to be disgusted by this, they were going to feel my pain and at least be disgusted by it too. I have been discouraged by my loverly wife against walking into the office and tossing the baggies onto the manager’s desk from a distance of a few feet, making a satisfying thud. She says I should save the real drama for later, if need be. I am also inclined (but will not… rest easy my dear) to ask for a refund on my rent to the tune of the cost of having an exterminator come out, since I’m doing that job already, and more effeciently at that.
If my camera was with me, I’d catalogue the kills as I go — alas, it is not. Maybe I can convince GonzO to take pictures of them as they make it to the morgue. At any rate, keep an eye on the Rat-O-Meter up top as I keep score.
Sleep well, gentle readers. Try to ignore that little pitter-patter in the night… if it’s not followed up by an electrical snap, it’s no fun at all.