My Rat Story

A multi-media presentation.

Because I live in beautiful Malibu, California, I am fortunate to see many forms of wild life on a daily basis: pelicans, coyotes, deer, squirrels, peacocks, hawks, dolphins, sea lions, and the most frightening one of them all, sixty year old men on skateboards. There is also a large rat population.

A couple times a year, I discover unusual tooth marks in the uncooked sweet potatoes. In the olden days, that meant sneaking up on unsuspecting men I was dating to inspect their teeth when they took a snooze . But nowadays, I just assume there is a rat in residence. And because I am such an animal lover, my approach to handling the situation was to buy one of those humane Hav-a-Hart traps that allows you to catch them in a little cage, rather than kill them,.

The only down side to them is that by necessity, the traps are pretty large. Once you set them, perhaps on your kitchen counter next to the Mr. Coffee, if you happen to also have guests over and say to them “Help yourself to some coffee.”, your unspoken follow-up remark is “Oh, by the way,… I have rats.”

A lot of people don’t like that,.

A lot of people hate rats, despite the videos on You Tube showing that there are other people who say they make affectionate pets. And if you tickle them on their belly, they giggle. For me, they are essentially small dogs who can climb straight up a wall or disappear under a dishwasher. Talk about a great Stupid Pet Trick!

Wikipedia calls them “Opportunistic survivors who live with and near humans!” a definition that completely explains why I relate to them since that is also a near perfect description of me! “Tamed rats are generally friendly.” Wikipedia goes on to say, “They demonstrate altruistic behaviour to other rats in experiments, including freeing them from cages and then sharing their food.” This makes rats better role models than almost all of the people I read about today in the New York Times. Talk about aspirational behavior! Wikipedia also adds,“ All the female rats in the study did this, but only 30% of the males .” This also didn’t surprise me.

 The first time I set up my Hav-a-Heart trap, I caught a rat on the second day. And although I was excited that it worked, I found it disturbing to see a terrified and hysterical prisoner in a cage on my kitchen counter. Having a hostage made me feel like I was Buffalo Bill in ‘Silence of the Lambs’, imagery that turned out to be a real conflict with enjoying my morning coffee. Almost immediately, I became overwhelmed by intense pressure to go release him.

So before I had even started any of my usual morning rituals like tooth brushing or taking a shower, I put on a coat and headed down the street, carrying a hostage in a cage, in search of a good spot for release. 

As I walked, I was very aware of the weight of responsibility involved in selecting a new home for who knows how many generations of rats.

An undeveloped vacant double lot, about a mile away, looked like the best place in the area for a rat homestead.  And by the way, I had begun to think of him as ‘The Little Rat on the Prairie.’ By now, I was also hearing the theme to ‘Born Free’ playing in my head as I imagined the viral and award winning cell phone video I would make to perfectly capture the moment. It was fast becoming an emotional moment for me as I realized what a wonderful person I was.

Unfortunately, this is as far as I got with the video.

But later that same morning, as I was contemplating the acceptance speech I would eventually make at some humane society award banquet, I glanced at the New York Times science section and saw an article on rat intelligence. Apparently, I learned, rats have something called  GRID CELLS in ‘the enterhinal cortex’ of their brains. What that means is that they have neurons that emit pulses of electricity in a regular pattern that creates a sort of topographical brain map of all of their movements. And this allows them to find their way back home over distances of up to 10 miles.

In other words, because I had dropped Ratsy off a mere two miles from my house, I had just given him a free ride to a nice afternoon in the park where he could enjoy a jog, get some sun, maybe find a few edible seeds or part of a discarded sandwich and still be back at my house long before happy hour.

And that is precisely what happened. He was back by supper.

The second time I caught him, I knew I had to do things differently. It was also eleven o’clock at night. Now, I understood that I had to go on a road trip of more than ten miles with him in order to relocate him to some rat friendly destination where he would have to remain because it was beyond the reach of his grid cells. But as I started to envision the two of us on a ten mile road trip, driving the speed limit on some dark dangerous Los Angeles highway, I also imagined a hypothetical scenario in which he got loose, scurried up my pants leg and caused me to freak out so hard that I spun the steering wheel and turned over the car. For all my saintly rescue intentions, the net result would have found me trapped upside down in a mangled car, staring into the face of a terrified rat.

That was why I decided to ask the husband to accompany me. But he wasn’t at home and it would be a while until he was. So while I waited, I kept watch over the cage, overcome with such a growing amount of empathy for my rodent prisoner that I felt like a member of a marauding militia sent out by a tyrannical dictator to uproot innocent, hard-working rat villagers from their homes. I was Joseph Goebbels. I was General Custer. The rat and his family were The Franks. They were the Lakota and the Cheyenne. The only thing keeping me from building this rat a nice little guest house in my back yard and offering to pay reparations was my lack of accurate information about the latest research findings regarding rats ability to still spread the plague. Until I could be reassured that this was no longer an issue, re-location seemed like the best idea.

As soon as the husband walked in the door, I greeted him with the words every tired man wants to hear;  “Honey…Don’t get too comfortable . You have to get back in the car and drive me 10 miles from here so I can relocate a rat.”  He rolled his eyes and sighed aggressively, but was otherwise a good sport as we carried the towel covered cage out to the CRV.

The plan was to drive down Pacific Coast Highway, away from the densest population centers, until we found a nice undeveloped piece of property far enough away to confuse the rat’s Grid Cells.

As we peeled out of the driveway, the husband, in his haste to get this questionable chore over with, made a very sharp turn. I could hear a rattle that immediately worried me. I was pretty sure I heard the cage tumbling around a little in the back. However, in the interest of not behaving like some harridan wife from a W.C. Fields movie, I held my tongue and did not spew any criticisms of his driving. At least not until he made a second severe turn and once more I heard some cage rattling. This time I felt I’d better speak up.

”You need to go easier on the turns.” I finally said to him,” I don’t know how sturdy that cage is.”

’Merrill, the cage is fine.“ he reassured me, his voice filled with the calm certainty that came from being the one who truly understood the situation because, after all, he had set the cage up. “The way the thing works is that when the animal enters, the clasp on the door springs shut, and automatically locks. “ he explained, “It’s impossible for him to get out.”

“I’m pretty sure I just saw the cage rolling around.” I said, awash in tension after I saw it happen a third time, ”Do me a favor and please slow down a little on turns.” And then I shut up. It was, after all, the middle of the night and we were carpooling with a rat on an empty highway. So I sat there, keeping a watchful eye on the odometer.

Two miles, three miles, four miles. Now it was five miles, so five more to go. Outside, we were seeing larger and larger stretches of undeveloped property. At mile eight, I began scanning the horizon for reasonable home sites for an upwardly mobile rat to settle down. He would need plenty of room that was not too near an occupied house where a rat-hating human might try to kill him and his future family.

And then I saw the perfect location. “Over there, on the right!,” I signaled to Andy, when we were almost at mile ten, “Let’s look at that property over there. Next to that nursery where I can see a…Jesus Christ, there’s a rat on my shoulder.”

And  I literally made those noises that Curly always makes in The Three Stooges.

”No. He’s not.” Andy, came right back at me quickly, “He can’t be. Because that cage is LOCKED.”

He was arguing with me about this because when couples argue in a car, in the middle of the night, nothing rational is ever said. Irrational arguments seem to be the way that disagreements in a car in the middle of the night are expedited toward some kind of a conclusion .

“He IS,” I say, confident in my opinion because…well, there was no other side to this. “He’s on my shoulder. “ I said, “Stop the car. I’m getting out.” And I opened the door, even though the car was still moving. This forced Andy to slow the car down… even as he was in the midst of saying, “Close the door and get back in the car.”

“No. “ I say, “I’m not getting back in the car. There’s a rat loose in there.”

“Get back in the car so I can pull over somewhere safe.” he answered, not trusting the danger level of his current spot on the side of the highway. And as I was saying NO with great passion for the third and final time, I heard those distinctive Curly noises coming out of HIM.

Quickly he pulled the car over onto whatever space was available and flung his door open, preparing to jump out. And just at that minute, I saw some scuttling past the windshield wipers. “He’s crossing the hood” I shouted. “Quick,” said Andy, “Get back in and close the door.”

We both jumped back in and the car peeled back onto the highway, headed in the direction of home. Neither one of us had any idea where our friend Citizen Rat was right now. In fact, we were both secretly worried that, like the Robert de Niro/Max Cady character in Cape Fear, he had found a way to hang on to the underside the car, and we were giving him an express ride back to our house.

“Remember to hydrate,” was the last thing I remember yelling to him, as we departed the scene, hoping he would find the lot by the nursery without any further guidance from me.

In retrospect, it remains my hope that, despite the ensuing chaos, we helped him find a pleasant spot for his relocation. I like to think it went rather well. He never came back, though to say that I miss him would be a real exaggeration. But I do get an Eagles-like peaceful, easy, feeling imagining him settling into his much nicer new residence.

I also imagine him talking to his grandchildren, telling them the story of the horrible, giant pink storm troopers who snatched him from his home and dropped him off in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.

I only hope that in the re-telling, the family finally realizes that I wasn’t Joseph Goebbels. I was actually Oskar Schindler.