Basement Encounter

I was working in the basement of a friend's house, and as I set up an area for cutting boards, I spotted this brown rat on the sandy floor, dead. I think it was an adult female, since it isn't as large as rats can get. It was just beginning to stink, just a little as I double-bagged it and put it outside in the basket of my bicycle.

My friend and customer (whose basement this is) was very surprised at the news of a dead rat. She never saw it and was grateful that I had taken care of the matter. She would not have been able to handle it. She'd have hired someone to come by and remove the little corpse. Many people are like that.

I asked if she had set out poison traps, and indeed she had. I'm opposed to this practice but, since there are no family pets, I write it off as another case of alien logic, like being squeamish about the dead animal, keeping a vegan diet, following pro football, or some such thing.

I fished out a magazine and shot a page, showing me with a white rat on my shoulder several years ago. I thought of blipping it with this image in a collage but then I thought I wouldn't. Here it is as a blipfolio shot instead.

The photo shoot began my little adventure with the rat species. the photographer was hired by a big German magazine and brought all sorts of props to my house. I declined to pose with some of them, but I was delighted by the two rats, who climbed all over my face and head, pulled my glasses off, and explored every niche in my clothing.

After the session the photographer said he was going to give the rats back to the pet store where he'd bought them. I protested and decided to foster the eager siblings. I installed them in a fairly large aquarium and set them up with the right food and wood shavings and things to climb on. I was endlessly amazed for about a month by the way they would very rapidly shred entire large books. I'd give them some huge, obsolete dictionary and in four or five hours, the thing was a pile of confetti. I was lucky and found someone who adopted the pair. What a relief! I liked them and might well have learned to love them, but I did learn that rats are formidable creatures, impossible to ignore, never to be taken for granted or left to their own devices for more than a short while. Such a handful --way too much for me to take on.

It's too bad I did not get to meet this brown rat before she died her miserable death by poison. It's too bad she died. But know this: All of this world that is not to be conquered by humans is likely to be taken by the next-most-forceful species, the rat.