The Thing About Rats

Well friends, I've come to realise  lately that I've been living in this pretend back garden utopia, deluded by this idea that nothing beats compost. I've gotten so cocky about it that I've had my wormy minions, residents  of two compost bins AND a worm farm busily working overtime with double split shifts for the sake of the garden and my conscience. I've been real cocky about the impenetrable goodness of the compost pile. 'There is nothing that can beat it!' I've been heralding to anyone who listens. Pffff. I was wrong.

The thing about rats is they're a lot like humans. They're smart. They're adaptable. They're slaphappy breeders. Disease takes a fancy to them. And they're insatiable omnivores. While they've apparently moved in to the shed behind our back fence, they've been spending their frolicksome daylight hours prancing about our back lawn and their nights gorging like vikings on the contents of my compost. Upon opening the lids, a wide, deep tunnel goes from the top of the compost pile to  pretty much the centre of the earth, suggesting that these guys must have brought their own excavators.

The dogs have been paying almost zero attention to them. Sonny has been making a half-hearted attempt to herd them when they oocasionally make a daylight dash between bins and Missy's generously-sized head gets in the way of her actually seeing them at all. 

And speaking of dogs - it occurred to me, after the initial shock that someone smarter and smaller than me was stealing my black gold, that the presence of dog food might just be the initial drawcard for these voracious vermin. We've been treating the dog with bones the size of tree trunks which, unsurprisingly, takes them half a week to finally lick clean. In the meantime, they're left lying around for the next knawing session, which of course, leaves them exposed to the keen sense of smell of the new neighbours. 

On top of this, the finicky appetite of Sonny the Spoilt, usually means that he leaves half his bowl of food behind as he retires to bed each night. This is virtually an invitation for the pestilence to the Main Meal, after they've finished off the last skerrick of vegetable matter in the compost bins. 

My greatest fear, however has been that they'd finally get sick of my darling compost and head for the hills. The hills of the vegie garden that is. Once they tasted the sweet, sweet crunchiness of the celery,or the peppery delights of the rocket, it would all be over, I figured.

The final frontier came one morning when I got up and saw by the backdoor a scene of total carnage. The giant marrow grown from the zucchini patch in summer (which had rested like a trophy on the little garden table for months) had been diced, sliced, pulvarised, gouged and strewn across the ground in tiny bits. The little feckers had brazened up:

It was, like Gough  said, time.

All bones were collected and confiscated. Finicky eaters were given smaller portions in the morning, not night. Rat traps were drizzled with peanut butter and positioned in enemy camps (though I supervised the purchasing of the rat traps, I left the actual touching of the death snappers to the man hands...). And all food scrap offerings were temporarily re-channelled to the (gasp) kitchen bin.

One week later and no sign of any rats. The traps remain conspicuously poised and I now firmly believe that rats actually KNOW what rat traps are and therefore keenly avoid them. However, like their distant cousin, The Human, they appreciate a safe neighbourhood and it appears they've legged it out of here. Probably to the other side of the fence.

I wait, with bated breath and fresh food scraps, to see what happens next.