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Waging a major battle with a rat

Editor: It’s not a bad car, a couple of years old, but nice and shiny.

Editor:

It’s not a bad car, a couple of years old, but nice and shiny. How was I to know that some furry critter would like my Dodge Caravan as much as I do, and to my chagrin, take up residence in the motor compartment?

I wasn’t aware of this residency until the day I opened the hood to check the fluid levels and saw droppings scattered on top of the air cleaner.

Yep! A darn rat had found the area to be a very cozy abode, and rent free to boot.

I wasn’t about to allow such a blatant intrusion on my property and instantly plotted to get rid of the wee critter. There was absolutely no way a rat was going to be a tenant on my property if I had anything to say about it!

I declared war on the pesky rodent, but didn’t realize how resilient a rat could be, so as I trudged off to the hardware store I wasn’t prepared for a fight that would morph into a major battle with the wily pest.

The hardware store was stocked with all kinds of weaponry designed to rid a premise of rats so I chose a neat looking contraption with an enclosed tunnel leading to poisonous bait, thinking that it would be the quickest remedy.

After I set it under the hood of the car I waited a few days to see the results, only to find that it had been completely ignored. The beast had tried to crawl in, but it must have found it a bit tippy so didn’t persevere.

Looking in the engine compartment I could see more droppings than before and realized that I had been hoodwinked. Not by the critter, but by the manufacture of the baited contraption. No rat in its right mind would venture into the light weight plastic contraption as it was so light that it could move about while being entered and scare off a skittish pest.

I know what I’ll do... I’ll get some duct tape and tape the box to the battery. I’m so darn clever, it’s scary! Nope, that didn’t work! That resourceful rat simply ignored the box and ate the duct tape. Who would have ever thought of such a happenstance? The damn rat not only ate the tape but as parting shot, left a few tooth marks on the battery!

By now I’m a bit peeved and to vent my frustration I took a hammer and busted the “so-called” bait box to pieces, and upon retrieving the poison pellet, placed it on top of the air cleaner.

Can you believe it? That darn rat ate the poison, made a mess which I cleaned up and the very next day to my horror, there were more rat droppings! Man, that rat must have had a stomach of steel.

When I started this campaign to get rid of a rat, I put out perfumed drier sheets because someone said that rats didn’t like the smell, but in what seemed to be a gesture of defiance, the clever critter made a nest out of them!

Someone told me that the smell from a bar of Irish Spring soap would deter the beast. The rat ate the soap! Moth balls were supposed to ward a rat off. My rat couldn’t care less!

Can you believe this rat is now so familiar to me that I now call it “my rat?”

In the end what worked was an old-fashioned, spring-loaded rat trap. I tried baiting it with peanut butter, but, of course it was licked off without springing the trap.

Then by using cheese and setting the spring to a hair trigger release I finally slaughtered the little critter. However, after all was said and done I felt bad for the little rat’s demise as it was an admirable foe with a fierce sense of survival.

Ray Roch