If you are laying on the couch watching TV and suddenly you THINK you just saw a rat run down the hall, I want you to know that yes, you saw a rat run down the hall. And the odds are that there is another rat somewhere.
So the day after thinking I might have seen a rat scamper down my hall I saw it again, this time in the doorway to my bedroom.
My bedroom, where I watch TV and my kids come to play.
This is an infraction, and intolerable.
So off to home Depot I go to get some rat poison. Only when I get there, they don’t have the old D-Con box I had used many years ago. They hat some kind of new stuff. I checked the active ingredient.
Corn Gluten. That’s it. Corn Gluten. How can that be? Can you imagine a happier rat than one that is feasting in a corn crib? I read all about it, how Corn Gluten is supposed to kill a rat. But I don’t trust it. No sir. I want something that sounds deadly. Something with prefixes like Tetra, or Doxyl, or Cyano, and ends with string of letters and numbers. It seems the EPA has banned the good stuff. I bought a box of the Corn Gluten. And I called a friend that I had heard had a rat last year to find out if this shit really works
“No, I didn’t have a rat” he said “but I’ve got a box of the good stuff”.
It is illegal these days to use it.
I set out the bait. I could see the rats had eaten some corn gluten. But after a few days I thought I heard a rat, and then I thought I saw a rat, and as previously mentioned if you THINK you’ve seen a rat, you’ve seen a fucking rat. My son cornered one and shot him with a BB gun, but rats are tough. I chased one under the stove one morning at 5 AM.
So I bought a couple mechanical traps. Two different styles. I baited them up with fried chicken, TacoCasa, and half an ear of corn because you know rats love goddamn corn. And after 4 days now the traps haven’t been touched.
But neither have I THOUGHT I saw or heard a rat. I am assuming the corn gluten got them, and now they are communing with their Higher Power and eating like kings in that big corn crib in the sky.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t find rats particularly disgusting on an individual rat-by-rat basis. But as a group they are disturbing. I have a friend that LIKES rats. She keeps them as pets. She has a big cage for them, with rat toys, and running wheels, and little rat mirrors and cedar shavings and stuff. They come out and play with her, and then scurry back into their cage. If I could have a cage like that, and these rats would just go live in that cage and eat sunflower seeds, we would get along fine.
But that’s not what they do. They have to run and hide and chew holes in the wall and stuff.
I can abide this kind of behavior, so the rats had to go.
