How Far Would YOU Go?

What do you get when you mix cheese, peanut butter and cereal? It sounds like one of those revolting DIY snacks of the '70s, right? "Cheesy Peanut Toasties" or some such dreck. Actually, it's rat bait. You see, we bought a trap.

The dogs are showing every sign of being good terriers. They love to dig, they love to rip into things, they're playful and inquisitive and tireless. They're also completely incurious about the entire rodent world. They couldn't care less about dirt or leaves. They want to dig in the blankets in their doghouse, or in the carpet lining the little box they like to hide in. They completely dominate the stuffed wombat and hedgehog (the closest thing the pet store sells to stuffed rat toys) and the stuffed dodecahedron - they gutted that poor thing. But when faced with an actual rat, they were less than eager.

So, we decided that the problem was just that they haven't been introduced under the right circumstances. The right circumstances involve a large box of dirt, a rat, and a little dog. We've got the large box of dirt (a retired cold frame full of old potting soil), we've got the little dogs. Now, we just need a live rat.

This bad boy is going to give it to us. The directions say that rats love peanuts, cheese and cereal. Odd, it says nothing about chicken feed or eggs. Anyway, we mixed up a smelly mess of bait and smeared it on the bait tray of the trap, placing it near our compost bin. It's as close as we come to opening a restaurant for the little dears.

DAY 1: I'd put a lot of crumbly bait on the tray, and about half of it is gone, but the trap isn't sprung.

DAY 2: All the bait is gone, and the trap still isn't sprung. I blame the Pirate for not setting it correctly.

DAY 3: This time *I* set the trap, and I use an actual egg. Alas, by morning it's still there. Midway through the day, the Pirate takes the egg away thinking that he doesn't want to leave it where it will spoil, because the rats won't want a spoiled egg. Wait a minute - has he been living with the same rats I have? The ones who are tunneling through a foot of chicken droppings?

DAY 4: I mix more peanut butter into the mess to make it stickier. We've decided that the reason the trap hasn't been sprung is because the bait wasn't sticky enough to make the rats touch the tray, thus tripping the trap. Come morning, half the bait is again gone, and the trap is unsprung.

DAY 5: We put nothing out. Partly because our power went out and we had other things to attend to, partly because we're looking at ourselves and saying "We're mixing it up. We're giving those rats a sense of false security. Yeah. That's what we're doing. It's all part of our plan." We say this to ourselves over and over again, even when we're alone. It's getting that bad.

DAY 6: I dropped the only egg the hens managed to lay today. Luckily, very fresh eggs aren't nearly as liquid as older ones, so it retained its integrity nicely as I carried it to the trap and lovingly laid it on the bait tray. Morning will tell us whether this had its intended effect.

In the meantime, all of this is in aid of teaching these dogs to get happy about hunting rats. Because really, that's what it's all about. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to despair of ever turning this pair of pampered pooches into fearless hunters:

Chez Chiens

After completing a grueling 1500-mile round-trip foray to Phoenix and back over the weekend, I decided to complete the dog house I'd started before we left.



I'd finished the basic bones of the structure, the four walls attached to supports, and there was a surprising amount of scrap lumber on the floor of the garage. I put together the supports for the floor (yes, yes, I know that there's a technical term for them like joist or fleen or squootch or some such, but I don't care - it's a dog house, for crying out loud) and then had a horrible time getting the floor to fit exactly. Cutting the corners out to make room for the supports turned out to be the tricky bit, but in the end it went together just fine. I got the Pirate to attach the roof with hinges (for easy cleaning) and the entire thing went upstairs. With the addition of an old blanket (one that the little Goddess was loathe to give up), it became Esme's new palace.




Dagmar, on the other hand, is choosing to sleep rough rather than enjoy the comforts of the new digs. This tells me a couple of things: first, she's got a better-developed sense of refinement than her sister. Second, she's stockier and has more fur than Esme, so it's likely that she just finds the whole thing too hot for her taste. Esme tends to tremble with the cold as long as she's standing still (although when she's running, she radiates heat so effectively that picking her up and putting her down the front of your sweater becomes quite attractive, to those folks who don't mind a sweater full of smelly panting dog) so she has firmly established her presence in the new place.




The architecture reflects my own style - the fusion of lots of enthusiasm and precious little skill. The Pirate pointed out that it makes a nice companion to the chicken coop, and keeps a sort of symmetry. I think that the rustic beauty of the unfinished plywood, the steampunk elegance of twice as many screws as were necessary and the lack of any right angles whatsoever perfectly reflects my own philosophy of life, namely "Wow! We have dogs! I guess we'd better build them a house now. Do we have any wood?" A lesser person might give in to the lure of PetsMart, the temptation of a Dogloo, but not I! I am a builder! A pioneer! A maker of my own destiny, creator of my own paradise!

Kinda cheap, too.