Tickling rats for science

thanks Bags.

I really do have a "thing" about rats, the notion of tickling one is beyond my comfort zone. I once had to wrestle a dying one from my two huge dogs, who'd found it in the garden and were playing at catch with each other. I was alone at home, had flu and only let the dogs into the garden whilst getting myself a comforting lemsip. I ended up out there, in my room 13, wearing a nightie, wellies and gloves. Dreadful! Poor rat, it'd been poisoned by the council rat man and I confess i'd have been happy if it'd crawled into its tunnel and stayed there. My concern was that one of the loopy dogs would somehow ingest rat poison. Heartless eh! That poor rat wasn't laughing anyway. Neither was I, shivering back to bed, feeling quite exhausted.

Just testing!

That sounds really inhumane. Did you tell the council that the rats were taking so long to die?

j08 Rats are very suspicious of any "foods" suddenly appearing as they are very intelligent creatures. Therefore, they will take only a very small quantity of bait and see what happens. Nothing happens immediately with Warfarin so more will be ingested. Internal bleeding eventually causes death. The council or pest control company would have known that the process is quite drawn out.

Yes it is a dreadful death and absent's comments are spot on. We had floods on our road which meant rats were up from the drains, and finding lots to eat in our gardens as most of us feed the birds. Since this incident, I always bring the bird feeders in at night. We haven't had a recurrence, though I expect the rats aren't far away. They seem to be thriving in our town centres, because of the number of fast food outlets