On my shopping list today…
I’m heading out to do some shopping in a moment as we have guests coming for dinner tonight (Friday). Included on my list are: candles, cheese and rat poison.
Unwanted guests? Yes, kind of, but not those who are coming to dinner tonight, the rat poison is not for them (nor is it for Jack, who stars in our photos today). Actually, I probably won’t buy poison as it’s not a nice way to kill rats and, although they say otherwise, it’s not very good for cats if they get hold of it, though there are some which apparently are not harmful to cats. I’m not sure what to do about our little visitor(s) though, but I think I might have to invest in a trap of some sort. I actually quite like rats but I don’t want to share the house with them. How do I know we have a rat? Well, I’m not a great expert on droppings but a quick Google of ‘Rat poo’ led to some images which showed the same things as I’ve found in the laundry room and bathroom over these past couple of days. So, thinking about this logically:
I am assuming that they are coming from the ruin and land opposite the house. The vine has grown and stretches over the road to the land/house opposite. This seems to me the easiest access route. The alternatives would be to scale some pretty high walls or abseil down from above; and I wouldn’t put it past them to do this. The drains are all covered, there’s no signs of through-the-wall entry and the biggest clue is that the laundry room door is always left open. This is going to be my first elimination. We leave the door open so that cat has somewhere to shelter in the winter and it just gets left open all year round, though at this time of year, he’s usually outside or on the roof overnight, so we can close that and then be on poo watch for a few days/nights to see if anything shows up. If it does then they are getting into that part of the house some other way. If it stops, then we know what to do. They will get bored and go somewhere else, I hope.
The second stage is to find some way to trap them and the third is to get the dreaded poison and be done with it, maybe putting it down at night and making sure it’s in a place where the cat can’t reach it, not that he did when we had mice in the old house. The Alarm Cat, as you may know, only eats finest quality, highly-expensive processed things in packets with names such as, ‘Dubious-Delicious’, ‘Once was Dog’ and ‘No Idea in Don’t-Ask Jelly.’ He loves them and won’t eat anything else. Unless it’s a giros from George up the road, which he is very partial to.
Okay, a couple of notes on the above. You would have noticed we have a cat and you’ve been wondering why the cat doesn’t do anything about the rat(s). Well, if you’d met the AC you would know how agile and enthusiastic he is; he runs away from spiders and enthusiastically ignores all other creatures, unless they come in vacuum packed sachets with an image of a contented feline on the front and are called ‘Have You Guessed What It Was Yet? Meat Treats For Cats.‘ Jack’s no good as a guard cat.
And the other note, which makes me more inclined to leave the rat(s) alone and hope they go away is that at least they do their business in the bathroom. Not only that, but they do it in the WC bowl – I kid you not. I assume they are on the lookout for water as the part of the house they are using as a hotel contains no food, we don’t live in it (it’s my office) and the only parts they can access is the laundry with a sink and a washing machine, and the bathroom. Now if they would only flush after them and use the little bin provided I’d be a lot more inclined to let them live. Don’t worry, they won’t be around for long – the Symi spider that wandered in off the balcony the other day will soon see to that, while the Alarm Cat watches from a safe distance.
