Scenes from real life 2: cold rats

One day when mom opened the door to the crawlspace under the front porch stairs, she was confronted by a large rat. It was apparently the biggest, ugliest and meanest rat on the face of the Earth, or at least it was the way mom explained it. This came as no surprise to us, but nevertheless, she was disturbed enough to buy a large box of rat bait. The large rat was never seen again. However, she had had a litter of baby rats sometime earlier and they were soon hungry and wandering throughout the garden.

One by one, over the next couple of days, the cats brought three small rats into the house. Live. It further upset my mother that the cats let the rats go in the house. Live.

It took several hours for us to find them. Though the cats could easily tell you the general area where they were, young rats have a habit of digging into small places where they are not easy to catch. After extensive use of salad tongs, they were all finally captured. I did feel bad about the tongs. To this day I don't know if these squeaks were from pain, fear or surprise.

Now what to do with the rats? Letting them go was out of the question. We had been battling the infestation for too long. Poison? Too cruel to watch and too slow. Drowning? Honestly, how can you drown a rat? They can swim and they were so cute. Suffocation would take way too long. There was only one easy and humane option:

Hypothermia, the silent killer.

Long a humane method of putting my goldfish to sleep in our house, it seemed the least painful for all parties involved. Yet, somehow after the rats had been safely secured in coffee cans and packed away into the freezer, all was not well. The night brought my mother a nightmare, in which we all died suddenly and my poor aunt had to clean out our freezer...