In honor of Conspi-Rat, I have another animal invasion story.
Last fall, a rat make its presence known in a very direct way in my former residence in Rochester, Vermont. I’m not sure how it got into the kitchen; perhaps it snuck in when I left the back door open for a few hours on an unusually warm day. I discovered its presence when I noticed that it had tried to drag a potato from a bag on the counter to the stove, where it abandoned the potato.
I soon learned that the rat was hiding behind (and in) the stove, using insulation it got from the wall behind the stove, and I could see its nest when I pulled out the drawer under the stove. The rat seemed to be emerging from the gap above the control panel, because I found food bits there where the rat had tried but failed to get the food down behind the stove.
I stuffed the gap behind the control panel of the stove with things (including steel wool) to prevent the rat from emerging, but it chewed through the material. Soon after, I was standing in the living room and saw the rat emerge from under the sofa and race into the kitchen. I followed it and saw it dash under the stove. So I placed traps, both Havahart and deadly ones, under the stove and next to the places where I thought the rat was emerging, and blocked most of the under-stove access with pieces of wood. Nothing worked. The rat even stuffed insulation into the traps to show its contempt for my useless efforts.
After the potato incident, I had put all food into cabinets, so the rat started coming out at night to eat the aloe plants on a window ledge in the living room. I put the aloe plants into another room, but still the rat occupied the kitchen and kept me awake at night with its chewing noises.
At one point, the spark igniters on the stove stopped working, which told me that the rat was chewing through wires. I pulled out the stove and found the wire break, and patched it with a soldering iron and some electrical tape. In the process I saw that the rat had tried to make a nest in the stove, on a shelf next to the back panel. I placed a trap there, but of course the rat avoided it.
I pulled the stove out and left it out so that I could access the area behind it, where the rat had been. I saw holes in the drywall behind the stove that the rat had dug, so it seemed that the rat was living in the walls, and using these holes to get into the kitchen. I spray-foamed the holes in the drywall, but after the rat chewed through the spray foam, I resorted to placing a sheet of plywood over the drywall to prevent the rat from digging more holes.
But this didn’t stop the rat. I think it must have been chewing holes in the drywall behind the kitchen cabinets (which I couldn’t reach), because I kept finding evidence of its presence elsewhere in the kitchen. It now seemed to be emerging from under the dishwasher, so I blocked off that access point with blocks of wood and a trap. Of course, the rat stuffed insulation into that trap as if to say, “Neener neener, stupid human!”
I kept hearing chewing noises, which often kept me awake at night, and then found that the rat had chewed a hole in the side panel of the cabinet next to the fridge. One night, when the chewing was particularly loud, I shone a flashlight into the gap between the fridge and the cabinet, and I saw the rat briefly as it scurried back into its hole. The rat looked wet, so I think it was taking water from the evaporator pan in in the back of the fridge.
I pulled out the fridge, so it could join the stove in occupying the kitchen floor, and to give me access to the new hole. I placed a trap next to the hole; the rat ignored the trap, but at least it never emerged from that hole again.
At this point, more than month into the battle, I was getting desperate, so I called a pest control company. The pest guy came out a couple of days later, and was very kind and sympathetic, and left me some rat poison bait and some big snap traps, free of charge. He said he wasn’t actually allowed to do anything to my house on his own to stop the rat, and that it was all up to me.
I placed the snap traps everywhere, and placed the bait in as many places as I could under the cabinets. I even pulled out the butcher block counter top over the dishwasher, so that I could put bait behind the dishwasher. I kept checking the bait locations, but the rat ignored the bait, as it had ignored the traps.
When I told a friend about the rat saga, she named the rat “Awful”, because the experience had been so awful for me. She also agreed with me that the rat was smarter than I was.
At this point, my battle with this ingenious rat had taken a total of six weeks. My kitchen looked like a war zone during this time. My nerves were shattered. But then the nighttime chewing noises started to slow down, so that I was hearing them only faintly, and only once or twice a day. Finally, around Christmas, I realized the noises had stopped completely, and I never heard them again, or saw any more evidence of the rat. I put the kitchen back in order and heaved a sigh of relief.
I’m still puzzled about what happened to the rat. I think if it had died, I would have smelled it. I already had spray-foamed a hole it had used to get into the basement, and when I looked at that hole again, I saw that the rat had chewed through the foam. So maybe it exited through the basement, perhaps going up the unused dryer vent tube to the outside world.
A couple of months later, while standing in line at the hardware store, I saw that the guy behind me was buying some spray foam that was supposed to repel pests, including rats. He told me his house had been invaded, and the clerk said he’d killed six river rats that winter. So apparently I wasn’t alone in this. It seems that the presence of the White River running through Rochester was an attractive feature for these rats. I sold the house and left Vermont a few months later, but I did not tell the new owner about Awful the Rat; I hope he never has to deal with that problem.
Been there, done that. Have PTRS (post-traumatic rat syndrome) as a result. My sympathies.