Rats!

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

Maybe this is oversharing, but oh well… back in November, I went up into the attic to get the Christmas stuff down, only to discover that a couple of the cardboard boxes I had packed everything up in back in January had been gnawed into.

There were little tufts of shredded tinsel, pieces of chewed up ornaments and such strewn about… and a little trail of gold foil wrappers. Somehow a bag of Reece’s peanut butter cups had gotten packed up with the other holiday stuff and a critter or critters had found them and feated on them.

I’m pretty much a live and let live kind of guy, but you don’t need varmints living in your attic, so I put down some mousetraps and some of those sticky pads and figured that would soon be the end of our little issue… I was wrong.

About two weeks later, I didn’t catch a mouse so much as he

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trapped himself, falling into the bathtub and being too fat to get himself out. I scooped him up with an old Amazon box and transported him out to the middle of a nearby field to live out the rest of his days. Problem solved, or so I thought… until we started hearing a scratching sound in our kitchen wall.

I moved the mousetraps down to under the sink. Two nights in a row, I heard the traps go off but no mouse. I reset them, because what else was there to do? This went on for several weeks and then one day, I ran the dishwasher and suddenly, the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen had two inches of standing water in it.

I did not make a connection between the dishwasher and the scratching noise until I pulled the dishwasher out of its spot by the sink and saw that the drain hose had been chewed nearly clean through.

This was clearly a job for a professional, so I called up Acme Past Control and they sent a guy over who confirmed that we had “a rat or two” in the house. Yuck…

He set out bait and traps and poison and such, so hopefully that will take care of it.

I will, however, have to keep an eye out for mold and water damage and such and I had to replace the drain hose, so this little problem might turn out to be a big one. I’ll keep you updated on the rats.

I wonder if you can sue a rat for damages?