the tinyblog

The rat is so bold now. We are seeing it in the evenings traipsing through the hallways and finding little droppings on the couch. We don't like it. We want it to go away. But we're not going to kill it. What on earth could we be thinking?

It Sounds Like a Squirrel

At some point in the winter...many, many weeks ago, we started hearing some scurrying in the walls. It happened at night, little things running around behind the bathtub shell.

At first we had no idea what it could be. Was it a rat? A squirrel? A possum? How was it getting into the house? It's one of those things where you are just living your day to day life and you just don't think about it until you hear the scurrying. A friend told us that if it were a squirrel, it would explain why it hadn't tried to come in the house. It was just using the walls for shelter. A rat, we assumed, would have come in the house by then.

Thou Shalt Not Kill

We told the landlord. She dropped off three old-school wooden snap-traps for us to use. I angrily threw them in the garbage.

I know it's silly, but as a part of the way I think the universe works, I really try to refrain from being the direct cause of another being's death. The Buddha recommended this not in a "Thou Shalt Not Kill" sort of commandments way, but taught that it was a way to be gain freedom from worry and fear.

I guess it's silly to spare a rat's life. Rats are vile vermin. They shit indescriminately, they chew through walls, they bite babies and lick toothbrushes. Even the most compassionate of our friends, when asked for advice, exclaimed, "The only good rat is a dead rat!"

But yet I can't help thinking of this little being, seeking shelter and food in a relatively innocent way. It grabs for a particularly succulent morsel of food and then the metal bar swings up, impossibly fast and crushes its arm and body. It's a little less palatable if you think of it happening to your puppy, or your mom or something. Anyway, silly or not, I've kind of made an internal decision that I'm not going to try and kill it.

At the same time, it's definately in the house now. I've seen it scurrying away a few times and we've found droppings. It clearly has some pretty free access to this cush little rat situation.

Possible Solutions

Well, there's the possibility of just restricting access. There's a couple of places we know of where it could get into the house and we could physically block them. But we suspect that by now there's a great deal of points of entry.

We could try and live trap it and relocate it. This is not something commonly done with rats, for obvious reasons. Even when we called the wildlife commission in Washington State, which doesn't recommend killing any wildlife, they said they didn't have much advice to offer us, and seemed surprised that we were reluctant to just kill it.

Plus, live trapping a rat is not such an easy job. Rats are smart and don't want to get caught. They won't walk into a trap unless there's really no other food available. When you have kids, that's a very hard thing to do. Plus, it can get outside and raid the compost. Cutting off the rat's food supply completely would be a pretty hard job involving a lot more stringent housecleaning, and the purchase of a lot of tupperware and jars.

Maybe the best thing is to kill it. But I just can't help feeling like the karma of killing it is to end up in a situation of being trapped in a deadly trap myself. I believe pretty strongly in causality. But it's endangering the health of the kids at this point I think. I wish there was some easier solution.