It usually begins with a quiet rasping in the woven bamboo ceiling, just enough to send Daisy, the resident dachshund, into high alert. A moment later the hysterical barking begins and I storm into the kitchen to find out what’s cooking. Daisy is poised in the middle of the narrow room, her long muzzle quivering with frustration as she gazes at her prey.
The rat sits high on the roof beam, polishing her whiskers in a leisurely fashion. She knows she’s invincible. She knows I don’t have the heart to set a glue trap and that I won’t put out poison in case other creatures sample it. She knows the dogs have no chance of catching her as long as she stays tantalizingly out of reach. She knows she has the run of the kitchen after dark, and that she and all her friends and relations that live in the roof are onto a good thing. She glances down at us mockingly from her bright black eyes.
What she doesn’t know is that I now have a secret weapon, and that she is Target for Tonight.
A year ago, a houseguest pointed out quite unnecessarily that I had rats. I couldn’t help but be aware of this already. Between the dogs and the evidence of my own eyes it was clear that there were a lot more creatures living under my roof than I had indented for. It’s part of the indoor/outdoor exotic tropical lifestyle; if you don’t seal yourself into an air-conditioned room (and sometimes even if you do), quite a lot of Bali’s wildlife wants to take up residence along with you. And the options for de-ratting your home are messy (glue traps), cruel (snap traps) or ineffective (shaking your fist and uttering hollow threats). But Patricia was not about to give up.
One day she delivered a stylish blue plastic box slightly smaller than a shoebox, designed in the United States by people who really knew their rodents. They also know the soft-hearted householder who can’t bear to see suffering, even by creatures that are spoiling the fruit and driving the dogs to distraction. The RatZapper is actually a little electrocution chamber. The batteries go in the top, the bait goes into the back of the box, and the rat goes in the open end in search of a peanut which happens to be sitting on a metal plate... New users are advised to let the trap sit around for a day or two without turning it on; let the rats have a free lunch and get used to this novel piece of furniture. Then bait it again, switch it on and turn out the lights…
Why, I thought, would a smart animal like a rat fall for a pathetic trick like this? But I left the blue box on the kitchen shelf with a few peanuts scattered inside and sure enough, the bait was gone the next day. So I baited it again and turned it on. The following morning the light at the top was blinking busily; we had already caught our first rat.
I peered into the box a little apprehensively, but the late rodent had indeed gone swiftly into that good night. I tipped it onto a piece of newspaper and sure enough, there wasn’t a mark on it. No blood, no wounds, no sign of stress. Just a puzzled glint in those still-bright little black eyes as if to say, “What the hell was THAT?”
Surely, you’d think, there would be some kind of energetic signature that something fairly unpleasant had taken place in the little blue box –- some scent or other clue that these peanuts came with a towering price tag. But no. The next day there was another catch. A few day’s pause and then another and another. One was so large that, even dead, I hesitated to handle it. It weighed in at 135 grams – well over a quarter of a pound to the undecimilized among us. A quarter pounder. Think about it. Suddenly, that bakso rumour began to make sense.
What was the rat population in my roof thinking about all this? Rats are social animals. Surely they were noticing that Uncle Bob hadn’t returned from his last foray to the kitchen… and hadn’t it been awhile since anyone saw Aunt Bertha? Sometimes there would be quite long pauses between catches, and I imagined emergency meetings in the rafters. What was happening down there? Where was everyone disappearing? Should scouts be sent? Perhaps the rat population ought to be considering emigration? I’d catch a couple of young males two days running, then nothing for a week. I often wished Big Bird, the bald parrot, could report on the nocturnal activities of the kitchen which was his domain. But his vocabulary remained limited to “Big Bird! Hi! I love you!” and some garbled phrase that might in fact be, “My God, this place is crawling with rats at night! You should do something!”
Rodent activity is pretty much nocturnal, unless some foraging rat has lost track of time in the fruit basket and finds itself still in the kitchen when morning comes and the Humans arrive. This happened just yesterday. I’d checked both RatZappers and found them empty. (Yes, I have a back-up; the worst thing about this gadget is that people are constantly borrowing it.) Time passed, we got on with our day, then suddenly Wayan and Big Bird shrieked in unison. A rat had ambled onto the top of the refrigerator, caught sight of Wayan, panicked and decided to take cover… in the handy little blue box. ZAP!
We are delighted with this technology, and wonder only why Indonesia, which has enough rats, plenty of plastic and access to abundant batteries, has not come up with a local equivalent. Please get on the job, LIPI. Meanwhile, I’m off to bait the Zapper again. Aunt Bertha is Target for Tonight.
