There’s a rat in the kitchen

I was newly out of bed the other morning and, just like the Queen, I was using the toilet (bathroom for our American friends) when Mr Scott calls out: “Did you get up in the night and eat half a peach?”

No, I hadn’t. It’s just not something I would do. “No, I didn’t,” I called back, “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Well, there’s a half-eaten peach …” etc, etc, and with that we decided to continue the discussion when I vacated the toilet.

I took one look at the peach and the bits of spat-out skin left on the bench and I said: “Rat!”

But Mr Scott had remarkably turned into a rodent dentition expert – à la my sister who became the shark expert – and said that it wasn’t the doings of a rat because the teeth marks were spaced too far apart! If there is any one of you out there who can look at the photo and give a negative to a large Norwegian Brown, please contact me.

Mr Scott’s dentition career was brief as we quickly discovered a trail of rat droppings leading to an open window by the water tank. The pipes that run from the house to the water tank beneath this window do so in such a manner as to provide a virtual escalator for any rat who cared to visit.

So there was a rat and it ate half a peach. Big deal, I hear you say. Harden the whatever up!

Well, here’s the rub. The Norwegian Brown entered the house, hopped on to the bench and had a snack, moved the fruit bowl and bench miscellanea around and used the benchtop as a toilet … about 10 metres away from two blissfully unaware dogs WHO FANCY THEMSELVES AS RAT CATCHERS!

Admittedly one now nears the age of 16 and is completely deaf and spends her days in a dream world somewhere between earth and an extraterrestrial paddock of warm juicy lambs so it could be argued that her body may have been 10 metres away but her mind had long since left the building. But Eddie, WAKE UP! Aren’t you the fox terrier mix who just lives for chasing cats, rats, rabbits and stoats?

This next bit is for you, Eddie. We were your third home in the first nine months of your life and we’ve kept you another nine or ten years with little demand on yourself apart from those heartfelt pleas to stop smelling like a billy goat and would you PLEASE STOP THAT BARKING! However, that was a big FAIL on not barking at the rat, Eddie. We know you know how to bark. You bark at people who move at what you consider to be an inappropriate speed; you bark at people up ladders; and sometimes you just bark at people. You bark at all animals, especially cats, and you’ve even been known to bark at the big poster of the cat on the wall at the vet clinic. You’ve been caught barking at your reflection in the window which is a screamingly uncool thing to do. But Eddie, just this once, couldn’t you have barked at an appropriate moment?