Rats!

Honestly, I didn't start this blog to only write about pest control, but this follows logically from the first posting about the possum in the living room.

A week or two ago we were having dinner with David and Alka, and they mentioned driving by a place "that sounded really scary" - and we recognized it right away as one of Tom's favorites - "Do-It-Yourself Pest Control" (that really is the name of it - it's on Chamblee Tucker Road).

There is - let us be frank here - a rat issue in the neighborhood. We used to have a cat, but then we got the dog and the cat moved next door to live with Kathy and Steve, who did not have a dog, and then later the cat died. So we no longer have an effective natural predator of small rodents patrolling the perimeter of our house. At around the same time a house on an adjacent street (not Wessyngton Road) was knocked down to make way for a Large House that is Architecturally Dissimilar from Adjacent Houses (LHADAH). The neighborhood rumor is that the house that was knocked down was infested with rats. So the rats, now homeless, went Searching for New Homes and some of them decided that they wanted to live at our house.

Now it's not that we didn't already have rats - we did. Sarah has two rats that live in a cage in the upstairs bathroom. (Actually for several days one of them was living behind the washing machine, but that's another story.) But these are actual pet rats, obtained from people who make you wash your hands before you handle rats as opposed to washing them after you handle them, not the more independent ones who are accustomed to making their own way in the world.

So Tom went to visit the guys at Do-It-Yourself Pest Control, and got some traps. We never caught a rat in the traps, and as the nocturnal visitations went on there seemed some danger that the rats would get comfortable, move in, bring their friends, and generally not be good neighbors - and perhaps even chew through the insulation on some wire and burn the house down. So we knew we needed to move on to more desperate measures - either getting another cat (who might not distinguish between the various rats potentially available for catching) or poison. The guys at Do-It-Yourself didn't have cats but they did talk to Tom about poison, and I have to say the results were pretty stunning.

The poison looks like azalea food but comes in big chunks which are put in the same black plastic boxes that housed the traps. We lost a couple of the boxes (raccoons, we are guessing) but have seen no non-resident rats in the house since Tom put the poison out.

Of course rat control is most effective if implemented at the neighborhood level. We have a couple of LHADAHs on our street, one of which is under construction, and one of which is completed and currently for sale. Anyone who is thinking about paying $1.3M for a house....well, don't you think they should know? Full disclosure and all.