The guerilla warfare has been ongoing for thousands of years, and probably started soon after humankind first began to live together in small groups, first in temporary settlements that eventually became permanent villages and later, cities. One wonders how long it took before rats and mice discovered that humans in dwellings meant an easy source of food and relative protection from natural predators. Something to ponder, I suppose. But whenever it began, the battle skirmishes continue. My uncle, who was a zoologist, did a study on rat eradication for the Army during WW II. He discovered that when rat populations were being extensively exterminated, the fertility of the females increased: they gave birth to larger litters and had more litters per year. I wonder if that is happening around our home place here, where we have been exterminating rats and mice since we took up occupancy in 1981. These rats are not the scroungy, ugly animals associated with the city, living in filth and rummaging in the garbage). No, our rats are a variety of Neotoma albigula— the pack rat—a beautiful animal (except for that nasty tail), light fawn in color with a creamy throat and underside. The beauty ends there though. They are as fully capable of spreading plague and other diseases via their fleas as their citified cousins and they are extremely destructive. Their obsession with chewing on electrical wiring ruined our 1978 Volvo, which is now beyond repair and rusting away in the side yard, disrupted phone service when our phone lines were chewed through, and almost caused a house fire (now all of our electrical wiring is in metal conduit). Smaller, but no less destructive and no less capable of spreading disease (remember Hanta virus?), are the two main varieties of mice that run through the silverware and kitchen towel drawers, leaving poop and spots of urine behind, and who shred clothes and/or papers in my husband’s files to make nests: the “house mouse” and the beautiful little Peromyscus leucopus, or white-footed deer mouse, which is what was staring up at us from the bottom of a 5-gallon pail of sunflower seeds in R’s office other morning. “Look what I have,” he says. “What shall I do with it?” We have killed hundreds of them over the years (I am frequently the executioner if no gun is involved) so it was a stupid question. Maybe he asked it because he didn’t want to kill it himself and he thought maybe I would say “I’ll take care of it.” Only somehow I just didn’t feel like killing anything either and it seemed a better idea to take it far away from the house and let it go, which is what he did when he left for town. Later he said, in reference to the mouse, “you know something, we are weird!” Yes honey, I know. We are weird…
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