Trying To Be Nice About It

[poliphilo]

It's raining off and on, it's windy, the temperature has dropped- and the sun- when we get to see it- seems suddenly to be hanging much lower in the sky.

I have relocated the back garden bird feeder further away from the house: rats for the discouragement of. The rats had created trenches underneath and around the feeder- from which they used to sally forth to grab food the birds had dropped- like Tommies conducting missions in No Man's Land. This morning I fetched earth from a burn site in the field and filled the trenches in.

Rats are cute at a distance, intelligent too, but- as Julia was telling me yesterday- have highly irregular private lives. She's trying to harden me against them in case we have to start trapping and killing. The last resort would be poison but if we went there I'd feel terrible- like a Borgia- or the CEO of Monsanto.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Difference being that there's actually zero historical evidence that the Borgias ever poisoned anyone............

Lucrezia gets a particularly unfair press although Cesare was truly an evil swine.

[athenais]

Once a year I harden my heart and call in the gopher trapper. I will never resort to poison. At least a trap is a quick death. Ditto for the rats who used to move in and out under our house, now a thing of the past once the traps did their work and we scattered dreadful-smelling-to-rats clumps of peppermint oil-infused cotton around the area.

[poliphilo]

Another legend bites the dust...

[poliphilo]

Peppermint oil! That's an excellent idea!

[cmcmck]

Spiders don't like it much either!

[poliphilo]

And we have lots and lots of spiders.