not the motorcycle diaries

Despite the discovery yesterday of Angry Little Girls, I emerge from this weekend completely traumatised. This is because it seems I have finally succeeded in killing the rat which has been terrorising our kitchen for the past few months.

When it first became apparent that this creature was hanging out amongst our foodstuffs, I dealt with it by either pretending it wasn’t there or pretending that it was perfectly practicable to co-exist with a rat. This fantasy was rendered impossible on the morning I discovered a half-gnawed avocado on the kitchen table, which I might have been able to ignore had it not been accompanied by 1cm droppings and the smell of ammonia in the sugar bowl. Shortly afterwards we actually saw the rat sniffing around at the top of the kitchen cupboards. It looked like a very small possum, and had become comfortable enough in our house to eye us balefully before scuppering off into the shadowy recesses of our poorly constructed kitchen wall.

As the most obsessive person in my lovely household, I masochistically took up the mantle of Rat Eliminator. I consulted my Dad about how to get rid of rats. As a long term pigeon breeder, he’s quite the authority on things like this. He said the only way to get rid of rats is to poison them so they die, and told me not to bother with any poison except Talon. I decided to compromise by getting Rentokil, convincing myself that perhaps a less effective poison would just make the rat sick for a couple of days. Consequently, it would decide that our kitchen was not such a pleasant place to build a rodent empire of food scraps after all, and it was never going to come back. Furthermore, it would share this information with all its little possum-rat friends as well, thus ensuring we would never have this problem again.

Rentokil was laid and after a few days most of it was eaten. It appeared to have had zero effect. The rat persisted, and we started being able to hear it fossicking under the floorboards and in the walls. We waited another few weeks. Nothing, except that it seemed to have set up permanent camp in a gap between the wall and our kitchen cupboards, where it would scratch at the chipboard, causing bits of it to fall in little piles on the cupboards while we were cooking.

I found Mortein Throw Packs in the supermarket. They’re little bags of rat poison that you throw into those hard to reach places. The rat is supposed to chew through the bag, eat the poison, and die. But not this rat. Two weeks after throwing the packs, the scratching continued and the piles of chipboard were bigger than ever.

Heavy-hearted, I laid the deceptively innocuous-looking Talon two nights ago. The scratching has stopped. The chipboard is intact. Our avocados remain whole, and an eerie silence has settled over the kitchen.

Rat poison uses warfarin to thin the blood of the rat so that it can’t coagulate. This makes the rat awfully sick and it usually scampers outside to find water, where it dies the horrible slow death of an internal haemophiliac. However, I laid so much bait that it probably didn’t have time to retreat outside, so perhaps tomorrow I will have a nice story about removing its decomposed body from aforementioned shadowy recesses.

I am a killer. This is worse than the time I had to drink a glass of straight gin in order to deal with an infestation of weevils.