We haven’t had a rat in my nuclear family. We have acquired more exotic pets, like the chinchilla and the ferret. Now we have a bunny to satisfy the small rodent category, and though not particularly affectionate, he is soft, and he doesn’t smell. There are rats in the neighborhood though, rats as big as my Corgi, with tails like whips and teeth out of a horror movie. I haven’t seen any recently, but my neighbor said they had some nesting in their foundation and had to get Pest Control out. Though pest seems like too small a word for these creatures. We used to see rats that big roaming around our compost pile when I was a kid. They barely flinched at the pellets spraying from my brothers’ BB guns. I was so scared after seeing one that I can remember staying inside for a few days because at four or five I wasn’t a whole lot bigger than they were. Last summer I did see a Nutria Rat swimming in the lake, and from the dock they look like otters, except for the tail. They are almost cute, semi-benign looking at that distance. The kids call them Water Rats. But they have seen them at close range in the lake when they were young, and from their stories those rats are every bit as frightening as the ones I saw at their age. Tales of rats biting kids would fly around the beach like wildfire and keep them out of the lake for a few days. My kids are older now, but they still swim gingerly around those areas where Water Rats have been spotted.
I did have a pet rat when I was a kid. Her name was Spicy because of her coloring. She was white, with brown and black speckles, like she had rolled in pepper and cinnamon. She was cute, fairly small and very affectionate, burrowing under my clothes when I let her out of her cage. Two of my brothers got rats at the same time, big white males with red eyes and pink tails and huge balls. They were UGLY. My mother, though an animal lover at heart, had a problem with those rats. I still don’t know why exactly because her favorite character in Charlotte’s Web was Templeton. In the movie version he looked exactly like my brothers’ rats, so aesthetic repugnance seemed contradictory. Maybe the animated version, filled with Templeton’s Dionysian greed and wit and verbal repartee, blinded her to his physical reality. Whatever the reason for this inconsistency, she acted unilaterally to get rid of those rats. My brothers used to let them out in their room to run around, but then forget to put them back in their cage. Except that our Siamese cat, Scratchy, knew exactly when they were left unattended, and one day got her opportunity for easy prey. My brothers were asleep in their beds, and when my mother came in to check on them she noticed the rats weren’t in their cage. She looked around, and then saw the cat under one of the twin beds with a rat in her mouth. She called in a sweet whispery voice to Scratchy, “Here kitty kitty kitty.” Scratchy growled and slunk further under the bed. My mother couldn’t reach her with her arm and called again, this time with a lower, more commanding whisper, “Here kitty kitty kitty!” She was trying to get her point across while not waking up the boys, but when have cats ever come when they’re called? She finally crawled halfway under the bed, grabbed the cat by the scruff and dragged her out, taking the rat from the cat’s mouth relatively unharmed. Scratchy had still been in the “playing” phase. But my mother was so repulsed by the whole experience that she put both rats back in the cage, loaded the cage in the car, and drove to a parking lot behind the dump where she uncharacteristically, and unsentimentally, let them out. She told my brothers the cat got them.
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