Our house borders a canyon wherein the vermin flourish. They come in under the cover of darkness to feed in our garden. The rats are the worst. I don't mind rats, per se, but these are self-indulgent rats. Our tomatoes aren't eaten so much as they're tasted. A cluster of four Romas gets a bite each from the invading rat. Perhaps it's sampling them and reviewing them on Rat Yelp.
Our dogs all think they are great hunters and vigorously chase game when they're in the canyons and off leash, but only the small, fat chihuahua, Lily, is a real hunter. She's not in the same league as a cat when it comes to merciless slaughter, but she does OK for a dog. The other three dogs are hopeless cases when it comes to predating.
The other morning, when I brought my wife her morning coffee to her in bed, I discovered a slobbered, dead rat on the bed next to a pleased, fat, little chihuahua. It was endearing to me, but alarming to wife kitteh.
Lily was given High Praise and the rat was disposed of, but only after the coroner took photos to use as evidence if the case ever goes to ratty trial. Enjoy?
3 comments:
Yes, for killing rats it is hard to beat an enthusiastic, medium-to-small dog. Cats have trouble with rats, particularly big ones. When I was a kid, we had a major rat infestation*, and the cats were no help at all. Then, my mother acquired a little terrier-type dog. Dad didn't take the dog seriously, until one day we saw her dashing around the corn crib. Every now and then, she would stop and shake her head vigorously, and then drop something and dash off. When we investigated, every spot where she shook her head, there was a dead rat.
*The reason we had the rat infestation, was that the grain elevator in town blew up and burned to the ground, the way they do. Over the next few weeks, a wave of newly homeless grain-elevator rats washed across the countryside. Since we were only two miles outside of town, they eventually got to us. Some of them were almost as big as the cats. We didn't get the rat population back down to manageable levels until we were able to pull all of the old hay out of the barn, and shake it out so that the rat-dogs that we'd borrowed from the neighbor could have at it. Then we spent the whole summer pouring concrete rat-walls around every building that they rats tried to burrow into.
We had a little half wire haired terrier on the farm, stood about nine inches tall at the shoulder, from memory I think her neck muscles were larger than her head, and like you say when she caught a rat it was probably dead within half a second from the shaking. Funny how they know to do that and what makes the rat such an enemy it must be destroyed immediately?
The 'rat' in your pic is I think a big mouse! Or I suppose an undernourished rat.
I love those stories!
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