How Crazy Can We Make Emilie Today?

5-3-11

My rodent problem continues.  I use the word rodent, not mouse, because I can no longer deny the truth.  Those aren’t mice in my house.  They’re rats.

In my defense, I’ve never seen either a mouse or rat up close and personal.  I’ve been blessed to live in rodent free houses all my life.  But it was my friend Elena (a former volunteer who struggled with similar problems) that finally said to me, “Emilie, deal with it.  You’ve got rats.  Stop calling them mice.”  Still unable to face the truth, I starting researching both mice and rats online.  Based upon descriptions of behavior and size, I finally accepted the truth: my furry little inhabitants were undoubtedly black rats.  And we all know that if you read it on Wikipedia, it has to be true.  I’m pretty sure it’s peer-reviewed.

(A word of advice: if you are so unfortunate as to have a rat problem in your house, do not, I repeat DO NOT google “diseases humans can get from rats”.  You won’t sleep for a year.)

So, the clean house thing has been less efficient than I hoped.  I seemed to confuse the rats for a night or two by moving and cleaning things, but they were worse than ever after a few nights.  There’s nothing left for them to eat in my house, but they still run around on the tops of the walls, on the roof beams, on my refrigerator, and even (ahh!) climb on my mosquito net on occasion.  This is not acceptable.

I started setting out poison about a week or two ago.  At first I just left out plain poison, in hopes that they would eat it, but these rats are too clever for that.  Then I hid it in peanut butter, but they just ate as far as the poison and then stopped, the sneaky bastards!  Then I mushed it in with banana, and they seemed to like that well enough.  After a week of watching them nibble at poison-laced banana, the rodent population didn’t seem visibly lesser.  They seemed loud as ever at night, making me wonder if (a) they just weren’t eating enough of it or (b) there are a lot more of them than I thought, and not enough were dying.

I complained about this to Niña Cruz, who told me that she had also been seeing rats in her house.  She thought that they were probably the same ones, and mentioned that she was getting a cat to deal with them.  Would I like one too?

Well, not really.  I hate cats.  The only cat I’ve ever liked is my family’s deceased cat (creatively named Kitty).  And I only really liked him once he got all fat and lazy and didn’t like pouncing and scratching and biting anymore.  But…this rodent problem is taking over my life.  I can’t sleep well at night.  I spend all night with a flashlight clutched in my hand, waiting to flash the light at any bold little bugger who tries to start climbing my mosquito net.  I doze off at night, then wake up again when they start making noise, over and over and over.  I can’t really relax into sleep until the sun has come up and the rats go to sleep, which is almost time for me to get up anyway. 

So, I decided a cat would be the lesser of two evils.  Cruz promised to get me one, although I didn’t realize she was going to procure one so quickly.  She came over last night (24 hours after we first talked about it) bearing a trembling little bundle of gray and white.  Yeah, that’s right.  She brought me a kitten.  It’s barely bigger than the rats.  So I’m not sure how much help it’s going to be in the immediate future.  I also had no food to give it.  When I said that to Cruz, she looked at me and said (hand to God), “You want to feed it?” 

According to her (and all my other neighbors), if you actually feed your cat (outside of the odd tortilla at meal times), they’ll get lazy and not want to catch rats.  Well, this does explain why all the neighborhood cats (and dogs, for that matter) are bare bones.  Because their families don’t actually give them food.  They have to rely on rat hunting.  Well, I’m not doing that.  I may hate cats, but I’m not starving an animal I’m responsible for.  (I have an unfortunate history with accidently starving a pet – I did that once as a small child to my bird Snowball – suffice it to say it scarred me for life.)

Lacking anything better, I’ve been giving her milk and bread, which she’s been more or less eating, once I leave the room and she stops trembling.  (She’s absolutely terrified of me.)  I’m heading into Chalate tomorrow to buy some cat food – it’s not common here, but I think I saw some in the Super Selectos, our “high end” super market.  I’m not sure what to name her yet, but I’ll think about it.  She’ll probably just end up being Kitty, like my old family cat – who also acquired that name from the inability of my sisters and I to make a decision.

Update from 5-16-11

Well, she has a name, and that name is LOCA.  Because she’s flipping crazy.  The first few days, she was terrified of everything.  She got out of my house and spent a day and a half cowering under the big metal barrels of corn.  I finally lured her out with some cat food.  Since then, she’s lost her fear and become a big fan of attacking my feet like they’re about to morph into roosters (the only thing around my house she’s still afraid of).  She also likes to rear up on her back paws and swipe at shadows like she’s a lion and they’re particularly tricksy gazelles.

Much like the rats, Loca seems to share a propensity for climbing up my mosquito net, making me worried that she’s going to rip a hole in it.  Since my mosquito net is my little cage of safety against all the creepy crawlies living in my house, this is simply not acceptable.  Joanna told me to buy a spray bottle and spray her each time she does it.  I couldn’t find one, so I ended up buying a ketchup bottle and filling it with water.  So now, every time she tries to climb the net, she gets a squirt.  It seems to more or less work.  Although I will say, it’s annoying to have to sleep with a water-filled ketchup bottle next to me.

She also seems perversely fond of crapping right in front of the makeshift litter box I put out for her.  It’s like she’s trying to annoy me.  She purposely ignores the box full of sand, poops on the ground, and then she scratches the tile in front of it, in hopes that this time she’ll manage to bury her feces.  I’ve finally started keeping her outside until just before I go to bed, and then getting up at 5:30 when she starts meowing, so she doesn’t go in the house.  Man, I hate cats.  You know, I really shouldn’t be responsible for a living thing other than myself.  I once managed to kill a bamboo plant.  A bamboo plant!  Those things can go for months without being watered.  They’re the camels of the plant world.  And it this point, I still have more affection for that plant than my new pet.  It doesn’t bode well for the life span of Loca.

However, despite my own ineptitude and the admonitions of my friends and neighbors, I’ve been feeding my cat daily with cat food.  Seeing as how she’s about the same size as the rats, it didn’t seem fair to force her to hunt them for food just yet.  I will say that her presence has toned down the rat population somewhat.  One or two still come into my house at night near my refrigerator, but they don’t climb along the roof beams or on my mosquito net anymore.  I’m ready for the day that she’s big enough to hunt and eat them, though.  I obviously can’t put out traps or poison for the remaining rats without risking killing Loca.  (Although some days, I’m tempted to take the chance.)

In completely unrelated news, I was talking to Niña Angelita the other day when she said to me, “Emilie, Niña Margarita was here the other day and told me how fat you looked!” 

“Oh, really?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “and you haven’t been sick lately, have you?”

“Well, no…” I admitted.

“Because when you’re sick, you don’t eat much, and you get thin.  But you haven’t been sick, so you’re fat!”

Since I had just been thinking that morning that I had actually lost a couple pounds more, I couldn’t resist trying to contradict her.  “But Angelita, I’ve actually lost weight since I’ve been here.”

“No WAY!” she exclaimed.  Then she smacked me on the butt and said, “What about all this?”

Thanks, Angelita.  If I’d wanted my self esteem drop like a stone I could’ve stayed in the comfort of my own (ratless) home and let my female relatives do the job.  I’d also like to point out that Niña Margarita and Angelita are both built along the same lines…about six inches shorter and twenty pounds heavier than me.  Each.

I get that it’s another culture and we’re sensitive sallies in the US about this stuff, but still…if I hear one more Salvadoran woman comment on how big my butt is, how much I’m sweating, or how red my face gets when I walk places, I’m gonna flip my shit. 

So now we’re all clear on where my breaking point is.  Apparently, I can handle rats, toads, scorpions (I had one crawl up my neck the other day), and bats, but tell me I’m getting fat one too many times, and you’ll drive me right back to the US.