A Conversation With My Wife About Rescue Rats

I don’t exactly remember how we got on the topic.

“They’ve trained rats to find survivors in collapsed buildings now,” my wife said.

I got serious. “They’ve what?”

“Yeah,” she continued. “If you’re in a building that collapses, they can send in a rat with a camera to find you.”

“I’m glad you told me,” I said. “I would have killed it.”

She laughed.

“I would,” I insisted. “I would have killed every one they sent after me. They would have found me long dead, surrounded by them.”

If I’m in a makeshift tomb, I’m not sharing it with fancy rats. Even if they’re doing nobler work than anything I would have been up to at the time.

We’d been discussing the farm field out back — the builder’s salesperson was just sure it was inactive and waiting for houses to be built — and talking about our relief that the house wasn’t crawling with rodents now that the field had, of course, been planted and harvested after we’d moved in.

This wasn’t exactly hypothetical. When our 8-year-old was first on the way, we lived in a duplex across town that backed up to half a mile of amber waves of grain. After the harvest, all God’s creatures fled the field and overtook the first structures they could find, unfortunately inhabited by everyone on our side of the street.

Mice rarely work the way you think. Everyone makes the same mistake when trying to catch them, for example. You think they want cheese like in the cartoons. They would eat the cheese, sure, but the most effective bait is peanut butter, probably a lot like how you would catch a dog.

You think you’re safe if there are none of those little Tom & Jerry tunnel openings in the wall for a mouse to live in. How were those so ubiquitous in the 1940s, by the way? But in my first townhouse out on my own I trapped or killed 14 different mice. Many of them were up on counters.

At first they were shy. When I first suspected them, I left my old digital camcorder on a tripod filming the stovetop while I went out to drive through Panera. When I got back, I watched the footage in horror as they scampered all over the place, popping in and out of burner grates and disappearing into the igniter openings. Almost without question, my fast food habit had prevented fire mice from shooting out from under some Hamburger Helper to set the structure ablaze.

And they would have been happy to do it, too. They’re soulless little monsters. More than once I trapped one mouse only to find another one trying to eat it before I could even empty the trap.

“Why don’t you have some respect for yourself?” I shouted at one when I caught it in the act. Yelling at them was the best way to get them to stop what they were doing. They have crappy hearts, so on rare occasion, it killed them.

When I escalated to poison, my ex stepped on one that had died on the stairs. She was angry at me. That was convenient, of course, because anger at me didn’t require her to stop leaving food out or habitually trashing the place.

But they don’t need clutter. My wife and I first spotted one in the immaculate kitchen of our duplex when we were still two childless professionals, working full time and rarely eating at home. The scout mouse was plenty interested in sealed up cases of water bottles we’d put on the floor of the pantry that hadn’t even been removed from the plastic.

So that’s where we put the first trap, and that’s where the first one got caught while still alive and lodged under the pantry door, ultimately requiring my wife to handle the ordeal with a broom while I had a townhouse flashback.

We all had to buck up. The horrors were just beginning.

So many mice worked their way into the house that a snake came in after them and got caught in a glue trap. I discovered it while walking through the unfinished part of the basement to find some headphones. I ranted and raved for a long time before transferring the whole tangled trap into plasticware which I transferred into a trash bag which I transferred into the trash bin which I took to the curb about three days early.

Anyway, we bought our first house much sooner and moved in much faster than we’d planned.

We moved away for work and moved back to the area to be with the family after the remote revolution took hold (and, I don’t mind adding, we kept seeing snakes in the area that acted like they knew what I’d done). We were glad to come back to a smaller house where it was always a little too cold if it meant our little guy could be with Grandma and Grandpa again.

Now, I told my wife, we wanted for nothing but maybe a small robot I could lift up into the attic access who could roam around looking for scattered insulation and poop out fiberglass filament into the empty spots.

Or, y’know, something. That’s probably how we got to talking about the rescue rodents.

“It wouldn’t look like a regular rat,” she assured me. “They dress it up like Rambo with a little outfit and accessories like a GoPro.”

“I would have assumed it was out looting and wanted to pick over my corpse,” I told her. “I would have thrown my wallet with my ID in it somewhere just to spite them.”

And wouldn’t that be a fitting end, if the rats ended up the ones with the mess and the cameras, and they finally trapped me?