Rat Patrol

When small creatures cause big stress.

To make it easier for people to find Flower Child than it is for us to find a rat that got loose in our house, please click the ❤️ at the top or bottom of this email. Thank you!

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The culprit, Sparky.

Our rat problem was actually a cat problem.

Sparky, red in tooth and claw but not always willing to finish the job, had brought the rat into our house and then let it escape the jaws of death. When we got home one evening, we found him and fluffy Fiona (who’s never caught anything larger than a bug) in the bathroom, both with intent gazes fixed disconcertingly high. That was a bad sign. Sure enough, a rat was balancing on the shower curtain rod.

We locked the cats away, and after much hilarity and screaming, involving two brooms, a stepladder, and some kitchen tongs, Rafael and I failed to get the rat out of the house but managed to chase it to an undisclosed location in our kitchen. There, it settled in to live quite comfortably, barely making its presence known.

We left the back door slightly ajar that first night, hoping the rat would leave. For a day or two I was sure it had. Then, I noticed a chunk had been taken out of one of the bananas on the kitchen island. Around a fire pit in our backyard a few nights before, we’d been talking about banana boats (a s’mores-like camping concoction that involves digging into a banana to shape it like a canoe), so for a fraction of a moment I thought maybe Rafael had been the banana scooper. But that didn’t seem like something he’d do, especially so sloppily.

I put the remaining bananas in the fridge. The next morning, a few bites had been taken out of some lemons, bits of peel left on the counter. The rat was still with us.

In a panic, I bought an electric trap. I felt terrible about it, but it promised to be humane in zapping the rat and killing it instantly. I was relieved, though, when the zap trap didn’t work, and I followed that purchase with two rat-sized live traps.

Still no luck.

We grew increasingly frustrated, and our rat mitigation efforts escalated by the day. When the live traps didn’t work, I added six snap traps, several of them hidden in boxes so the cats couldn’t get to them and others placed strategically inside cabinets. We went into full-on surveillance mode with two cameras whose video footage I checked obsessively.

Still no luck.

All the cameras did was confirm the little guy or gal (we hoped a guy, or at least not a pregnant gal) was still in our house. We couldn’t see what it was eating, and by then we’d set up the cat food to be dispensed in small amounts by an automated feeder. The cat food was on a schedule; the rat’s movements were unpredictable.

No, Wyze, this was not a pet. But it did come out when we were eating breakfast in the next room! And it got around. Can you spot it in the second image?

The Rat Affair happened right when I was writing, in last week’s post about growing older, about my older-person’s ability to shrug off a stretch of hard days, knowing they won’t last. Yet with each passing day, my stress about the rat increased. Well, I guess I still need reminders about impermanence. That’s right: I’m not perfect.

During the rat’s stay, I heard a story on the radio of a guy who’d had severe PTSD from being a child soldier in Sudan, and I told myself my problems were small. They are. Yet the stress didn’t recede.

To be fair, though the creature was small and the problem was small, this wasn’t something I knew would get better in a few days. We’d once had a mouse living under our dishwasher for two months, only discovered there (though we knew it was somewhere in the vicinity) when three big, burly guys came to replace our dishwasher and burst into screams as the mouse ran out, revealing its stash of kibbles and soft nest decor. That time, Rafael had the brilliant idea of leaving a cat food bowl on the deck and the back door open all night, and we never saw the mouse again. But this time, we’d had too many raccoons around to leave food on our deck — plus, the rat didn’t seem to be going for the cat food, according to our surveillance cameras.

How can such a small creature cause so much stress? It reminded me of that African proverb, “If you think you’re too small to make a difference, you haven’t spent the night with a mosquito.”

Maybe, although small, the rat was just the last straw. Who isn’t already stressed these days by the state of our sweet old world? Add a few other things to that, even small ones, and it can feel like too much.

The rat story struck a nerve. People on social media were giving lots of useful advice, like telling us to name our new roommate or suggesting we move to a new house.

In a team meeting with one of my clients, the CEO, a warm but businesslike guy who heads a multi-million-dollar company, heard me mention my rat problem and suddenly felt the urge to ask ChatGPT to write a poem about it. He sent me the result in the third direct message he’s ever sent me in three years.

In the warm, cozy house of a kind girl named Ro,
Lived a sleek little cat with a fine, furry glow.
His name was Sir Whiskers, a prowler by night,
But today he had plans that felt perfectly right.

“I need a good buddy,” he purred with a grin,
“Someone who’s scrappy and quick-footed in sin!”
So off to the alley, he darted out flat—
And came back, quite proudly, with one nervous rat.

“I shall name you Lou!” said the cat with a cheer,
“We’ll be bestest of friends while we both live in here!”
But Rosana just gasped, “Is that RAT in my place?!”
“He’s a friend!” said the cat. “Don’t make that face!”

Lou squeaked out, “I’m tidy! I won’t eat your cheese,
I’ll sweep up the crumbs and I never have fleas!”
Rosana, still shocked, gave a shrug and a sigh,
“All right...but no parties. And don’t make me cry!”

So now in that home with its lavender mat,
Lives Rosana, Sir Whiskers, and Lou the small rat.
They read and they nap, they eat snacks by the plate—
And they proved, once again, that it’s never too late.

Clearly, people had feelings about the Rat Affair.

My own feelings were mixed. I felt sorry for the little thing, but I didn’t want a rat running around our kitchen counters. I wished we could tell it we wanted to save it and take it outdoors, so it would willingly venture into a live trap. I wished we could tell Sparky not to bring live prey into our house.

But all I could do was keep trying to coax the rat out or trap it. I hoped it would choose one of the live traps, but I wasn’t above killing the thing.

Naturally, this being the Bay Area and all, someone pointed out the apparent hypocrisy of meat eaters feeling bad about killing rodents. I get it. Yes, I eat meat — lots of chicken, small amounts of red meat now and then. But those animals haven’t been living with me, and I don’t kill them in my house — or do the killing at all. When I think about the animals I eat having been killed, I feel bad. But I still eat them. I told you: I’m not perfect. Far from it.

As Fiona, our non-hunting cat, sat in my lap purring one night during the Rat Affair, I was flooded with an awareness that the rat was just another little creature like her — like all of us — trying to survive. Despite our rat-mitigation arsenal, I felt for it: a smart, social creature isolated from its friends and family, disoriented in strange surroundings, fearing for its life. It had as much right to live as Fiona did. As I did.

Did it live? We don’t know for sure. This is the way our rat story ends: not with a bang but with a whimper. The rat wasn’t caught in one of the eight traps I set; it wasn’t chased dramatically out of the house. Because we haven’t spotted it on camera for a week as of this writing, we’ve presumed it managed to find its way to freedom. We can only hope that’s what actually happened.

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It felt odd writing about such a small thing this week, the week that fascism descended on LA in a prelude of what’s to come across the nation. Thanks to Laura Lentz for reminding me that’s okay with her essay “Write about the Small Things.” As she says:

“When people ask me what I write about now, I always say the small things.

Perhaps this is the way to take refuge from the chaos, and also move forward in this complicated world that sometimes feels like a rusted childhood swing about to break just as we are lifting into the air to fly.”