RATS AND MICE (AND SUCH SMALL DEER)

That's a mouse up there - a house mouse (Mus musculus).  Its scientific name means 'mouse littlemouse'.  They don't survive long outdoors, but generally we don't like them indoors.  However, you can now put up a device that keeps out unwanted rodents by releasing a sound that repels them.  Be careful, though, if you keep pet rodents.  You don't want a frenzied guinea-pig on your hands.

In my grandfather's day, trap and cat were the usual devices that drove mice out.  My grandfather had other ideas.  He used gunpowder until one day he blew out the stairs.  My grandmother made him desist from the practice.

In France, tooth fairies are thought to be mice.

The rat is held in even greater distaste by householders.  The commoner ones are the black rat (Rattus rattus) and the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus).  Both are found worldwide.  On shipboard, it is supposedly unlucky to mention a rat and you should use the term longtail instead.  The same word is used on the Isle of Man, a British dependency between Britain and Ireland.

The black rat is said to have carried the parasite that brought the Black Death.  In the 18th Century the brown rats, migrating across eastern Europe, reached the Baltic and there boarded ships that transported them worldwide.  In Britain they proceeded to kill off most of the black rats and there hasn't been a plague there since.

In Ireland, if you needed to get rid of rats, a rat whisperer might be called to your farm.  He would use some unknown process to make the rats leave.  As he could never be watched while he executed this, no one knows what he does.

If you have a rat in your house, it is said he will leave if you go to the rat hole and simply ask him to.  You should suggest while doing so the location of an alternative place of residence.  Some people have declared the efficacy of stuffing a written letter into the rat hole, suggesting he leave.

In the London sewers, it is said there is a King Rat, bigger than the other rats and treated by them with deference.

The London sewers in the 19th Century were said to have a Queen Rat, who would turn herself into human form and copulate with toshers, poor folk who went fishing in the sewers.  It had no effect on their health, but children they subsequently begot had eyes of different colors.

NAOMI AND HER RATS

RICHARD FREEMAN: See How they Run

The boy Freeman is a most peculiar fellow, and gets interested in the most peculiar things...


An 89 year old war veteran was being eaten alive by mice in a nursing home in south west Queensland. The rodents chewed through his ears and head as he feebly tried to brush them off. He was literally being eaten alive and almost died. The man' daughter complained to her MP Ray Hopper, who likened the situation to something in the Third World. The man was bed-ridden and had limited communication ability so he could not tell anyone about the rodentine onslaught.

Queensland's Health Minister Paul Lucas has apologized to the victim and his family, and offered to relocate other residents of the facility.

It is surprising how rats and mice, in some conditions can behave like the rodents in James Herbert’s books. I recall, back in the 1980s, reading of an old woman who had suffered a stroke but was still alive and conscious. As she lay helpless rats gnawed the flesh from her shoulder blades.

Back in June 1881, in Philadelphia, Mrs. Theodore Fritz left a five week old infant with her two daughters aged 3 and 5 whilst she was out on an errand. Neighbors heard the child screaming but found he doors locked. Upon her return Mrs. Fritz saw a huge rat on the bed next to her child. It leapt off and escaped through a hole in the wall. He babies whole face was almost entirely eaten and one arm gnawed to the bone. There were bite marks all over it.

On December 13, 2006, in Kirkland, Washington, USA. A King County sheriff's deputy responded to a complaint about rats at a Kirkland-area home. She found his carcass being eaten by rats.On Monday, the deputy found a decomposed body, believed to be that of 67-year-old Thomas Harold Stone, on a bed in an upstairs bedroom. She wrote that body was being eaten by rats as she watched and one ran between her feet while she was there. Neighbors had repeatedly complained that rats were a problem at Stone's home and the Health Department had ordered him to clean up his rat-infested property. He was reclusive and told the neighbors rats were his friends. A neighbour recently complained again to King County Councilwoman Jane Hague who called Sheriff Sue Rahr who sent the deputy to the home.

The deputy wrote that she could smell faeces from the curb and the house was covered in waste, filth and rats.

The Illustrated Police News reported a similar case in the 1870s.

HORRIBLE DISCOVERY OF A GIRL EATEN BY RATS

A most appalling discovery was made last week in the town of Haverball. The circumstances of the case are both remarkable and horrible to the last degree. The facts are as follows:

For some months past a man named William Laslett, his wife, and a daughter (a girl about thirteen years of age) have occupied two rooms on the basement story of a house in Princess Street. Laslett, it appears, is a traveling hawker in the hardware line; he keeps a horse and cart, with which he travels from town to town, and has been accustomed to be absent from home six or eight weeks at a time. Occasionally, he would take with him his daughter on his traveling expeditions, but more frequently his wife accompanied him.

He left Princess Street with the latter seven weeks ago, Jane Laslett the daughter remaining behind. The young girl was seen by her neighbors for a few days after her parents had departed, when all of a sudden she was missed. The doors of both rooms in the occupation of the Laslett's were locked, and the natural inference was that Jane had left to join her parents, and she had been known to do so before on more than one occasion. Weeks passed over; the suspicions of the other occupants of the house that something was amiss became stronger every day.

An unpleasant and sickening odour crept up the staircase and found its way into the several apartments. On Monday last, a carpenter who occupied one of the upper rooms was prevailed upon to break open the door, which led to those on the basement, whereupon he was horror struck at the sight presented to him.

Upon the door being burst open, a legion of rats scampered in all directions. The greater portion of the body of the poor girl had been devoured by the rats. The medical gentlemen who have since made a post mortem examination, concur in the opinion that Jane Laslett died suddenly from disease of the heart of long standing - that her death had in all probability taken place some weeks back, since which time the rats had been feeding on the body.

The father and mother have not yet returned, nor do the neighbours know where to communicate with them.

Well it seems like the old guy in Queensland had a narrow squeak!