(video above. Be careful you might find it amusing)
Day 1:
Liko, our ridiculous Shih-Tzu, detects a rat behind the stove. He stands in point position, watching. He digs at the stove. He barks. We pull out the stove, the rat makes a dash for it, Liko in persuit. The rat, or can I say small cat, jumps into the living room window and busts through the screen.Liko's new name: RatHunter.
No joke.
Day 2:
A large black silhouette wanders across our bedroom windowsill as I gaze out, without my glasses, just waking up. We are two stories up and this is unusual enough to get my glasses on and get out of bed. (I think it's the cat, on the ledge OUTSIDE.) I get my glasses on and go have a look. Rat turds on the windowsill! I scream and scream.
(okay, slight exaggeration. I don't scream. But I want to.)
Day 3-10:
Rat is back in the kitchen (thank God, I prefer that to the bedroom). Liko is on the job. All day. Every day. We have to put him in doggie time out. We have to put the bark collar on him. We try to flush the rat by pulling out stove, fridge, setting traps at night when the dogs are locked up. He trips them but isn't caught. He's a wily one, oh and did I mention BIG?
Liko is very dedicated. His one brain cell is fixed on getting the rat.
Day 7: Rat makes it into food pantry. Son of a *&^%$!!! We have lots of disorganized food in there, you know the kind: half-eaten bags of pasta, flour from two years ago when I made cookies, potatoes getting ready to grow, etc. We close it up tight, set traps and hope. The rat laughs, eats merrily, and poops all over everything and ignores our traps.
Day 10: We're getting desperate. Hubby cleans all the food out of the pantry, buys new traps, puts all the food into Tupperware. Somehow (not sure how) the rat is still in the pantry. I come out late last night to get a glass of water and we have an ENCOUNTER. He looks at me. I try to get my camera to take his picture for the blog post. He disappears. He's good at that.
Day 11 (that would be today, 11-11-11) Hubby flushes the rat, who has fewer places to hide with all the Tupperware, and tries to chase him out of the kitchen with the BB gun. RatHunter helps. Around and around they go, and then the rat dives behind the stove.*&^%!!! I am unable to film this excitement due to sleeping with ear plugs.
At least he's out of the pantry, it's cleaned out, organized and Tupperwared. I'm a cup-half-full kind of person.
But the rat is STILL IN THE KITCHEN. I think in the end, they will be the life form that takes over the world.
RatHunter wonders why we can't do our part. I'm stumped too.
Oh, this is delightfully funny, and where oh where were the other two dogs? People always win. Don’t worry about that.
The other dogs show no interest whatsoever. We are stumped by that too. But Liko… he’s persistent!
I only have one thing to say to that: There’s a rat in mi kitchen…
Hee hee, awesome!
For a minute I thought your dog was a skunk. That would have been some rat hunter.
Have you tried those big traps that you could put peanut butter in and they they go inside and they are caught. Still alive but at least you don’t have to deal with a squished rat.
A couple of weeks ago all the dogs went tearing out of the house into the yard. I heard a big scuffle but that’s par for their course as they run and chase each other all the time.
Later that evening when I went out, I found a dead rat on the patio. That makes all the lack of sleep from sharing the bed with three dogs worth while.
Now to figure out that sleep problem.
Great story, I love it! We put them to bed in the laundry room every night, which seems to work.
We live in California. Our rats are not that big, but our Jack Russell Terrier mix is just as persistent as your Liko. When there are mice or rats in our yard/storage/house he will drive you insane with his persistence. He never digs in the yard, but we have holes around our storage shed where he has perceived a rat or mouse is or has been recently. If you try to pull him away, you get his growl which he never does unless there is prey involved. I truly understand your frustration.
We had no idea Liko, a shih tzu, was so fierce and persistent. I’ts quite annoying!
Eewww… RATS… Shiver! I’ve never had a rat in the house. Mice, yes, a rat, no – thank God! I’m told that rats are highly intelligent; your tale would bear that out. Sneaky, clever, vermin he is. He even thwarts your traps!
Have you considered a python? 🙂
Alas, they are illegal in Hawaii! my daughter owns one in California but we are not allowed such “invasive species” here. Too bad the rats were early immigrants.
This sounds like a sequel to Caddy Shack. If you’ve blown up your house, you’ve gone too far.
Ha ha, awesome! Too true!