The neighbours had guests at the weekend, they were all sitting on the patio outside, thankfully behind a tall fence, and all their dogs were in attendance. Still, Rizzo rocked up in broad daylight, ambling lazily across our patio, checking out the buffet under the bird table and, upon finding nothing, since we'd stopped feeding anything to discourage him and his mates, he marched up to our patio window, and, get this, pushed himself up against the glass for a good old sniff and display. Hello, humans. Where's my tea? Can I have what you're having? Once I'd stopped panicking (Ohmygodwhatiftheneighboursseehimnowitwillbeinstantsocialdeath), my heart melted: he is so cute. We could tame him if we're smart. We have more or less tamed him if he's doing that. But, it has to be said, he's also getting cheeky.
"Can you look up what it means when rats come out in the daytime?" OH requested, ever practical. We were sitting inside our extension at our table and were having our dinner -- allotment leek tarts and smoked salmon. I could understand that Rizzo wanted some of that: I made it after all!
He disappeared. A minute later we could hear him directly above us, rummaging only a few feet away in the ceiling. "Yep," OH said, "That's him home. He's just put the kettle on."
Later I looked up rats' social behaviour and discovered three possible explanations for daytime sightings, which I shared with OH: 1. he's a socially inferior male cast out by the local rat king and told to sort himself out for food so he has to hunt on his own when there's no-one else competing with him for it. That means daytime. "Great," OH remarked, "Of all the rats we could get, we're getting Billy No-Mates." -- "We're his mates," I said, "And they only stay alive in the wild for a year. We've had him for two years now. We're doing really well with our animals -- look at Mr Tubby, look at Neuroticat, they practically live forever!"
The second possibility was that there wasn't enough food further away from the house for a normal-sized rat population there so some of them had to pop down the garden to come to the house. And the third possibility, a bit too worrying to contemplate, that there was now a very large rat population close to the house and the garden so that some individuals were forced to hunt during the day, right in front of our noses. The next step will be our roof space swarming with rats and the critters gnawing their way through the concrete walls and ceilings to get at all the glutenfree goodies we've stored in our kitchen. We won't be able to keep the window tilted in my garden-facing bedroom at night because Rizzo plus friends and family will want to come in and enjoy the pleasures of central heating on a cold June morning. I'm usually on coffee-making duty and I can see myself putting together a whole tray of mugs and cups -- "Respect the Beard" for OH, plus a bunch of rodent-sized espresso cups for the rest of the family as they poke up from under my duvet. "Shuftie up, darlings," I will say, "and if one of you farts, you're out."
OH has mobilised the humane traps again, priming them with cat food and depositing them right on Rizzo's usual runway round our patio. He told me that one of them had the cat food nicked but, crucially, had not sprung. Perhaps he is smarter than all of us, but, and this is the crunch, according to the The Prevention of Damage by Pests Act 1949, we have a legal responsibility of dealing with rodent infestations on our property so it really is showtime now. If Rizzo doesn't allow himself to be caught by our humane trap, he won't be driven across several rivers and he won't be accidentally released back into the wild as we try to give him water and we will be forced to call in the council and then it's curtains for Rizzo. Because unlike us, the council pest control people are scary and deadly and they have the equipment.
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