Saving Rats

How did we get there from stuffed chickens?

I’ve been working on some thoughts about Beauty, very serious, but I’m actually here today to talk about rats.

I was out at the farm we get our CSA at today, picking flowers and herbs, eating popsicles, getting our veggies. It’s a whole experience, much bigger than a box of vegetables, which is why we drive out there instead of picking up the same veggies from our neighbor’s porch.

First there’s the drive: driving over the magical green bridge, looking for horses and weird ducks, being amazed at how tall the corn has grown, talking about A’s grandma’s dahlias when we pass the dahlia farm. Getting closer, the handpainted sign from summer 2020, almost lost in the foliage this year:

Old + white
BLM
Ain't Stupid

Then we see the cows and the barn and maybe Lena on a tractor and we’re there.

(I’m getting to the rats, I swear.)

On Saturday, when we drove out there, we caught This American Life on NPR, and after hearing about the man who had 14 pet rats running loose in his apartment, A. began petitioning for rats of her own. Firm no. We don’t have caged pets and we don’t have loose rats. Cool and loving and smart as they are.

Today, out there again (long story), I was chatting with Liz, the farm manager, at the cash register. We didn’t need her help; we eat enough popsicles we bought a whole punchcard of them up front. But I always chat with Liz. Liz is funny and insightful and knows all the answers about the farm. She also writes some of my favorite reading material, the boxletter. I would read anything she wrote, even if it’s just about kohlrabi. Once she saved A. a giant white turnip, which made everyone’s day. Also, we’ve been coming out the the farm A’s whole life, and we don’t come incognito.

So there Liz and I are, chatting, and I think it started with a stuffed wool chicken, but right away we find ourselves talking about rats.

Liz tells me a story about her cat going into rat holes to kill baby rats, and how once she left a live baby rat, if I have the story right, on their doorstep, and Liz’s partner was like, We have to save it! So there Liz was, driving to the store for kitten formula, and putting the rat on a hot water bottle. They bottle fed the little rat and it lived for a week.

I’m not really doing Liz’s story justice here, but I just keep thinking about the conundrum it illustrates, that tension between tenderness and practicality.

Twenty years ago, I dumped a pile of straw from my parents’ old barn into a compost pile, and a nest of pink hairless baby rats spilled out of it. I watched them slowly die in the sun as I carried out load after load of straw. It still makes me feel a little weird in the belly. They were babies, soft pink babies.

I respect rats. I know they are loving parents and creative problem solvers. I don’t like killing them, but I also prefer them to live, well, somewhere else. I’m aware of how often unwanted populations and people have been compared to rats.

I want there to be some beautiful mutual-flourishing solution. I’m not sure what it is.

I’d like, I guess, to coexist in a way where rats don’t threaten anything I care about, and I don’t have to threaten them. I like them to be, as S. put it, living like squirrels. I don’t know how they feel about that.

Liz and I didn’t solve the want-to-save-them-but-want-them-gone dilemma. We talked about ducks and chickens and rabbits, and which one would be the least rat-attractive poop source aka pet (her vote was rabbit), and then someone came up who actually needed Liz’s help, so I went off to eat my popsicle.