Rodents

Rodents.....ugh!  (Stop reading now if you don't want to read about rats)

So sometime in August, our fur-baby, Hannah, started being really interested in our breezeway.  Like wanted to get behind the mini-fridge in the corner obsessed!  My parents also came over about a month ago to help us with the vinyl siding on our garage and their dog was going crazy in the breezeway too!

When putting the vinyl siding up, we had to mess with the corner where the breezeway and garage meet.  Some insulation had to be monkeyed with but we were able to put the inside corner piece up to start the siding.


We have no access under the breezeway, it was an addition and is just kind of there.  We have no idea how it was constructed or anything.
 
A few days later, my husband takes our dog out in the morning and there is insulation strewn about from the corner.  GREAT!  FABULOUS! OH MY GOD! 


(I'd make it bigger but then it's blurry)

So our minds start running rampant. What could it be?  Squirrel? No, hole is too small.  Chipmunk?  Maybe (we hope it is just a chipmunk).  Rabbit?  Again, hole too small.  Then we both think it.....Rat?  Good possibility.  Our town has a rat problem, this is widely known but not much is being done about it.  

This is where I started getting the heebie jeebies, willies, squicked out, whatever you want to call it.  I DO NOT do rodents, spiders or snakes.  No sir, not now, not never, just NO.  Ugh, so H calls his dad and asks if we can borrow his Have-a-Heart trap.  Still hoping at this point that its any of the things listed except for the rat and that we could take it to the park and let it go, etc.

We set the trap and put some bread in it, not wanting anything really smelly as not to attract anything else.  Nothing happened for a week, bread disintegrated from the rain, and we were going to put more bait in it when it stopped raining.  Well, this past Saturday morning H went to let Hannah out and didn't think to look in the trap first and sure enough, there was a rat in it.  And he was so scared of Hannah, it was crying and whimpering in the cage.  

At this time, H wasn't sure it was actually a rat, said it looked like a hamster and had light brown fur, thought it was just a mouse.  He decided to take it to the park and let it go.  Ok, fine.

So we reset the trap for that next night.  H also filled in the hole with more insulation and pushed the pea stones up against it.  This would let us know if something was still trying to get in or out before we officially plugged the hole.

Sunday morning rolls around and we caught a rabbit.  We have a resident rabbit who knows right where the holes are in the chain link fence because Hannah chases it in the dark almost every night.  So I am sure it was the same one.  Why s/he was over near the trap, we will never know.  So s/he gets set free and we set the trap again.

H went to the store Monday night to get rat poison in the event we catch more.  Yup, another rat in the trap Tuesday morning.  So, H moved the trap to inside the garage, put a Decon packet into the cage and so we wait.  I refuse to even deal with it.  I do not want an image of a rat burned into my brain.  I find the rats in Lady and the Tramp to be terrifying enough as it is.

H plans to go out and look at getting a pellet gun so that we can get this over with and reset the trap, again...


This needs to end soon, it's getting colder here...

And yes, H said yesterday that we are complete idiots for not taking care of that hole months and months ago.  We should have known that something would find it and make a nice home.  Just our luck, always is...