I smell a rat!

Derek and I have had this long running issue with rats in the garage.
Growing up in Alaska, I've never ever in my whole life seen rats.
When I finally saw one, I nearly crapped my pants. Jeez! They are HUGE. As big as cats.
And mean looking, with the long tails and the red eyes. Creepeh!

A few years ago one of them ran in to me as I was opening the garage door. It actually ran away from me as I opened the garage door, it was avoiding my siren wail of my girlie man screaming. I am pretty sure everyone on the block heard me.

Derek said he'd put some poison down to kill it. I chided him. Poison is a bad idea for a few reasons:

A> If the rat eats it and dies, but crawls somewhere the dog can get at, my dog is indeed dumb enough to eat a dead rat. Then I'd have a sick dog, and a nasty dead rat, or remnants thereof.

B> If the rat avoids the poison, the dog might get into it. Then I'd still have a rat, and a sick dog.

C> If the rat eats the poison, but then pulls an Agatha Christie novel plot, it'll crawl just far enough to fall into something of value, and rot, and stink. And then we'll have a dead rat, and a nasty smell, and probably maggots. That is, provided that we could find where it crawled to.

I went and bough those 'glue traps'. We put them down in the garage.
A few days later, that damned thing had drug the trap from one end of the garage to another, after having been stuck to it, and then smeared sawdust all over it, and eventually extricated himself. Derek declared that we had in our garage a 'bionic' rat.

I then re-iterated my disapproval of the poison and opted for traps.
He told me that *I* would have to throw the traps away, rat and all.

*sigh*

Ok, poison it is.

That was 2 years ago, and Derek said the rat was gone for good, he moved on.

Fast forward to a month ago. Another rat moved into the neighborhood! The damned stray and feral cats are not doing a very good job. They are slacking. Derek puts some poison down.

Today, Derek was out in the garage smoking, and cleaning up his things. The garage is pretty much his domain. Travis and I keep clear of it for the most part. Something rotten was in the garage.

It was a rat. The rat. Big ugly nasty rat. Decomposing rat. Poisoned former rat. It had crawled up on the car seat he'd pulled out of his truck. (He put in a racing seat). He had planned to keep the seat to swap it back should he ever sell the car.

I tried not to be overly smug. But it does seem that the rat taught him a lesson. Oozy nasty dead rat guts all over his car seat.

I guess I'll pick up some snap traps tomorrow.