Rat Catching

A few weeks ago I was throwing some of our recyclables into the bin out in the garage.  As soon as I opened the door and turned the light on I immediately saw something large scurry down the side of the wall.  Dude! That had to be a rat! 

Since we were making dinner and Ben was in the kitchen I told him what I saw.  He said he hadn't seen anything like that in the garage since we moved in.  Neither have I until a few seconds ago.  I really hoped the rat hadn't gotten into anything important.  I went in there a few minutes later and checked our sleeping bags...we really didn't need rat nests or rat babies inside our camping gear.  We did notice there were two spots in the garage where something had been chewed.  One pile was plastic chards and the other was some sort of black foam bits.  I looked around for something that resembled those two things and I couldn't.  I have no idea where they were coming from.  Possibly the attic?

In the next few days I bought some traps.  A large one for rats and some smaller ones for the normal sized mice.  With my experience, which has reached expert level living out in the country, I have caught many mice and rats in my day.  One summer, many years ago, we caught over 40 mice...true story!  We have found out that your basic cheese does not work.  Some use peanut butter but I use chocolate.  You melt it just enough to where it's pliable so you can adhere it to the trap, it hardens and the rat can't walk away with the bait.

Earlier in the week Ben set the traps.  We hope that we could catch the little turd before he started getting into something else.  We checked everyday to see if we had a dead rat body.  No luck.  After the third day I was getting frustrated that we haven't caught him yet.

I stopped checking when I went into the garage the next few days.  It was getting hopeless that we would catch him.  We were making dinner again and I was tossing some of our glass jars and paper boxes into the bin again.  We turned the light on and Ben noticed we got him!  We finally caught him!  Yessss!  He was huge!!

Ben grabbed a bag and we posed with it like we had just caught the biggest fish in the lake.  It was awesome!  The thing weight at least a pound and a half and his tail was like 10 inches long!

We cleaned up the mess it made.  When the trap snapped on its head it gushed blood all over the floor.  It was cold so some of it froze to the garage floor.  I threw some hot water on it and then bleached it just so we knew the area was clean.  Ben tossed the rat body in the garbage can.  We were very proud that we destroyed the rat that could have eaten some of our camping gear or Ben's work gear.  We will have to keep an eye out on more of them.  I'm sure there are more rat and mice adventures in our future.  Until then.

Next Adventure:  Superbowl LI and Snow