Rats!

One of the local radio morning show's presenters commented, that living in Hout Bay is like being in a National Geographic show. She'd just moved into Hout Bay, and found a preying mantist and a scorpion in her bathroom that morning. We had a rat in our loft.

I spotted rat poop up there, and since Matias's two pet rats (Pharaoh and Basil) hadn't been up, I figured we had a third rat in the house, a wild one. Last week I went to four hardware stores to find a device to catch the bugger alive. All I was offered was to do with killing.

I don't see the point of killing something just because he happens to be in your house. He doesn't even know he's a nuisance. Also, if you poison someone, he will suffer. _And_ he will crawl somewhere to die, and rot where you can't reach him. Oh, what a stench that would be.

Heikki was kind enough to see my point of view, and spent a couple of hours on Friday making a rat trap. A foot and a half long wooden box with a cheese attached to a string attached to a door that would fall ddown when the cheese was touched.

We just caught the rat. A cute brown one. We didn't keep him as he might carry some diseases, but instead we drove him down the road and let him go.