#280 Lend Me Your Mouse-ears

So it’s really not much of a surprise that we are conflicted by whole rat thing. Rats, like dogs, come in numerous varieties, some of them very cute, others downright mangy. Take, for instance, the cutest of rats, the squirrel. Squirrels are the French Poodles of the rat world. All decked out in a lustrous gray coat and a bouffant tail, perched like a pompadour over the back of the squirrel’s head as it arches forward. The squirrel scampers across the landscape, eyes alert and expressive. And let’s not forget the captivating scene of a squirrel and his nuts. Perhaps that’s why we are drawn to them. When a squirrel holds a nut he looks almost human, his little paws just like hands as he puts it to his face and nibbles delicately. Contrast this with the Norwegian Wharf Rat, who, like his canine equivalent the junkyard mongrel, engenders feelings of repulsion and horror. A Norwegian Wharf Rat using his paws to hold up a nameless piece of gruesome garbage, while similar in form to the delicate nut-nibbling of his poodle-esque rodent kinfolk is nonetheless nauseating. We are, it appears, rat-ist. One variety of rat is praised and appreciated, the other shunned and feared. Adored or scorned because of a big bushy tail. Funny thing about squirrels, people actually put nuts out for them, to attract them to their yard. And put little squirrel jungle gyms out there for them to play on. The only thing they put out for rats is traps. Can you imagine a suburbanite putting out a feeder for a field mouse? Not likely.
Speaking of traps, they got a new one out that’s really cool. It’s plastic and it has a loop spring on the back end. There’s a little rocker in the hinge that is poised and balanced as perfectly as only the Chinese can mass manufacture. You can hold it open while you put a small dollop of peanut butter on the trip plate inside the maw of the trap and then set the whole thing down without it snap-clamping on your fingers. The effective force of the snap is enough to render rodents lifeless in a millisecond, breaking their rat vertebrae with nary a rat whimper. When last I emptied one, I noticed something interesting, the back ends of two tiny teeth. Seemed the trap had come down so suddenly it had knocked the teeth out of the rat’s head. Which isn’t as surprising as you might think. Rats would be no good in a bar fight, but they could keep coming back for more. The reason the rat family is called rodent is because the dent in the rodent refers to teeth. Namely the two “canine” teeth that wear down and get periodically replaced. Kind of like permanent baby teeth that re-grow and re-grow. That’s why rats can chew through walls and wires and concrete and stuff. They have an endless supply of dentition. It’s why they can handle nuts too. It’s just peanut butter they shouldn’t sink their teeth into. America, ya gotta love it.