Of Mice and Men

As of a week ago, we have an unwelcome addition to our home. No one (save Daughter) has set eyes on it, but evidence of its presence is turning up everywhere.

It started off with little bite marks on the apple and kiwis in the fruit bowl. We guessed that the little Phantom was a possum, and concluded that it had taken up residence in the roof (a fairly common occurrence in Australia) and found its way down into the house when hubby cut a hole in the ceiling for some DIY work. So we started hiding our fruit in the microwave and fridge, plugged up the hole, bought a possum cage online (the extra-big version at $44 a pop) and hauled it up into the roof cavity, using an apple as bait. Phantom accepted our offering, but evaded capture. Some cage! (We are now trying to see if we can get a refund).

Every morning for the next few days, I was greeted by the sight of poo (ie excrement) on the stove. Then I discover that it’s been chewing on the oven gloves I hang up near the stove. From there, it moved on to the kitchen floor rug, and a few days later to the rubber mat on the kitchen floor. With such a varied diet, we conclude that Phantom is no possum – he must be a rat. So I bring home another trap and some rat poison secured from my office groundsman, and set that up around the kitchen. Despite setting up an elaborate obstacle course for rodents, Phantom side steps both trap and poison, and continues taunting me with its droppings on the stove. So now, in addition to the human toilet I have to clean, I also have to clean Phantom’s toilet… every evening and every morning.

Emboldened by our feeble attempts, Phantom ventures further afield to the boys’ bedroom. I walk in there one morning to discover bits of B1’s $85 school bag on the floor. Turns out that B1 had a cookie in the outside pocket… since late last year! B1 denied any prior knowledge of the cookie, saying that a classmate had baked cookies for every person in class but that no one wanted it, and a friend must have put it in his bag without his knowledge, as a joke. To rephrase the well-worn excuse explaining why you didn’t complete your homework, B1 can now respond (with some truth) “The rat/mouse/possum ate my homework!” B1 thought this would be quite some story to share with his friends, but I wasn’t too keen, fearing the Department of Child Safety would remove all 3 kids from my care for being an unfit mother with a filthy home. Despite disposing of the offending cookie, Phantom revisited the bag and enlarged the hole, probably just to make sure that there were no crumbs left.

As last night was particularly humid, the family camped out in the only room in the house with air-conditioning – the living room. As we live in an open plan house, the living room, kitchen and dining room are in one big open area. We closed up all the bedroom doors, and were fairly sure that Phantom would remain in hiding for fear of detection. No such luck – he took another bite of the oven gloves, and we’re pretty sure he was in the air-cond unit (we had switched it off in the middle of the night) as we awoke to the sounds of scratching inside the unit. Hubby thinks he went there for a drink of water… or perhaps, like the rest of us, he was hot too.  

My research into the psychology of rats has revealed that they have what’s called “bait shyness”. They are naturally suspicious of anything new in the environment, and often won’t touch a bait until it’s been left there for several days/weeks. As for poison, it has to be slow acting – if it kills a rat instantly, the rest will know that it’s died from ingesting the poison, and they will stay away from it.

I don’t know how long more this will continue. The longer it drags out, the higher the chances are that he’ll destroy more things and (and this is highly likely) if there is more than one, they’ll breed and produce many more little Phantoms to drive us crazy.

The only thing that seems to work so far is B1’s schoolbag. I’m wondering if it’s worth investing another $85 in another school bag so that we can use the existing one as bait! But every cheapskate bone in my body is screaming out in protest – how can one (or God knows how many now) little pest cause so much damage?