A Rat's Ass

I think it may have been a confluence of factors that caused me to have a nightmare about mice and rats recently. 1: I saw the new movie, Nosferatu, where they employed hundreds of live, non CGI rats for maximum grotesque effect; 2: as a child we lived in one house where mice and rats competed for dominance, and 3: I accidentally ordered glue mouse traps and posted them on my local free cycle list where I was lectured in the comments about the cruelty of such traps.

I didn't argue with the people who objected, but I thought about the privilege that must go into prioritizing rodent life over a human's right to live in a pest and disease free environment. They must not have, for instance, have experienced watching a movie late at night on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket and felt the whoosh of a silky and slightly damp rat running over their bare feet; or have thrown a shoe at the wall to stop the rats from gnawing the wood studs for a few minutes to try to get some sleep, or witnessed a battle to the death between their pet cat and a rat almost the same size that lasted half an hour of loud screeching and thumping inside their stereo console. We waited anxiously fearing our cat would be seriously injured in this spontaneous brawl. Our sleek and mighty huntress cat, Spot, just barely out of kittenhood, emerged unscathed. The rat died a bloody death. In the room where that happened, the rats had chewed the wood paneling about three inches up from the floor, so there was an optical illusion of the floor being suspended in mid air.

When I was a little girl I had three white mice as pets, but these experiences changed my perspective. I no longer saw mice as cute and harmless. In my recent nightmare mice and rats were living under my bed in a storage box. I went to the hardware store to buy something to drive them away, and was instead shown products to feed them and properly hydrate them now that they had sought shelter in my home. I became enraged and shattered the bottle of whatever they were trying to sell me on the floor and screamed "I'm looking for a way to get rid of them, not breed them!" I am grateful not to have a rodent problem now, but people who do have that problem often do not have the financial resources to put the mice on birth control, for instance. Lecturing the mice and rats on abstinence, or leaving microcondoms out for them would be equally ineffective. Glue traps are an alternative to poisons that could kill endangered species in the food chain.

Recently a friend of mine who is legally blind was driven out of her home by a mouse infestation. She was sick for a few weeks and could not return until pest control had eradicated the rodent issue. There was a danger of contamination because she could not see mouse droppings on surfaces, and there were nests and droppings in other places she could not find without assistance. The threat of sickness and disease from rodent infestation is very real. Maybe at the systemic level something can be done to make humane pest control more accessible to people, but I will never judge individuals using the resources at their disposal to keep themselves and their families safe. I will always prioritize people over pests.