Rats!

One of the difficulties of setting yourself up with a place to publish relatively longform writing is that everything you write feels like it has to be important. A tweet can be written on the toilet, and often belong in that very receptacle, without feeling especially like a waste of effort. But to write hundreds or even thousands of words on unimportant topics, and even diarise, on a whole website dedicated just to yourself? Feels a little self-indulgent.

But back in the day we called people who did this “catbloggers”, and it was an honourable profession, not least because it often resulted in pictures of cats. I don’t have a cat these days, so we’ll have to make do with something alphabetically similar.

The other day we noticed that Something was getting into our raised garden beds and eating the freshly-planted melon shoots. Not long afterwards, my partner was up late with the baby and saw our motion-activated lights turning on and off in the garden for no apparent reason. She became convinced there was a rat, perhaps several rats, each four or five feet in length and ravenously dedicated first to melon shoots, then on to fresh produce, and finally unsatisfiable by anything less than baby flesh. So, off I trotted to Bunnings.

We had to get a humane, catch-and-release-style trap, because there was every possibility that the thing she maybe saw wasn’t a rat, or that it was a rat but something else would be tempted by the trap. We used to see a bluetongue lizard sunning itself in the garden occasionally, and if it’s still around, we certainly didn’t want it getting harmed by our traps. I bought several options, because I always do.

We settled on the Big Cheese single-catch cage, and smeared the trap mechanism with peanut butter. Within a couple hours of putting it out, we heard a clang, and sure enough, the rat had succumbed to the peanut buttery temptation. We’ve all been there. The garden rang with the sound of clanging as the rat tried and failed to escape, and my partner insisted on going outside to inspect it and make sure it was okay. She was shocked to find that the rat was, well, only rat-sized, and actually extremely cute. I promised to deal with it in the morning.

The thing about a catch-and-release-style trap is, once you’ve caught something, you have to release it. And you have to release it somewhere. And there really isn’t anywhere safe to release a rat: they’re menaces in the countryside, attacking native species or invading farmlands. And there was certainly nowhere in the city that I thought a rat might be welcome. The logical, and responsible, thing to do would be to kill the rat. Perhaps pass poisoned food into its cage, or submerge it in water until it drowned, or dash it against a wall. And … I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make a good argument for why any part of my surrounding countryside should have this rat inflicted on it, but I also couldn’t face killing it. That felt cold-blooded … evil. I tried not to think about what the rat will certainly do to the environment after I let it go.

The rat had been urinating all over the cage through the night, so I grabbed a water-resistant Huggies box to prevent him doing the same to my car. I had some errands to run, including dumping some garden waste off at the tip (I suspect the tip have their fair share of rats already, but that they would still look askance at me dropping off another). The whole time, driving around Canberra, I plotted mental maps of my surroundings and tried to determine what release places would give the rat the fewest attack vectors. I am certain I thought about this more deeply, and more overdramatically, than anyone has before, and I am equally certain that it did no-one any good. I finally settled on a fairly isolated spot with lots of tall grass not far from a freeway.

That’s when I re-read the trap instructions, and noticed that they ended just before they explained how to safely release the animal. There was even a QR code, which linked to the manufacturer’s YouTube channel, which had a detailed video for every product they made … except this one. There was a catch on the door, but surely you weren’t supposed to put your hand, gloved or no, right where the rat would be exiting? Turns out: yes. Also turns out: the rat was completely uninterested in exiting the cage until I’d made it clear that my scary ol’ hand was going to be nowhere near the door, so fair play to it, I guess.

Now our replanted melon seeds have had time to germinate, and yesterday we inspected the garden to see how they were coming along. It turns out Something is still getting into our garden beds and eating the freshly-planted melon shoots.