Rats

Being the barn manager at Five Ring has given me some incredible opportunities and experiences -grooming for Kyle and Parker at Burghley, competing in my first intermediate, buying and reselling my first baby Henry, riding a huge variety of horses and learning the workings of a top eventing barn just to name a few. However one of the things I did not count on when moving down to Florida to work for the Carter's was becoming resident rat killer.  My reaction to rodents in the past had been to hope they go away and feel kind of sad when my Dad put out traps for the cute little mice that tried to move into our kitchen.  So at first I settled for setting out some traps and hoping the critters would go away. I mean I literally hoped they would see the trap, say “Oh I guess we aren’t welcome here MaryLou, we should move to the back field and live out our days in peace” and go their merry ways. Unfortunately, few of the rats took this course.  Instead, they were persistent. They did not laze around falling into traps and nibbling at bate (except when we gave them Nutrena XTN grain which they loved. Sign of a top quality grain? That is yet to be determined). They were dedicated, sneaky, multiplying masters of deceit. They ate my tall boots and the billets on my girth and then they ate the tack cleaning sponges. Who likes to eat sponges??! The mice/ rats at this point went from innocent creatures fighting for survival one kernel of grain at a time, to sponge eating weirdos. Turns out, weirdos are a lot easier to dislike. I forgot about poor Mary Lou and decided it was war. Armed with shovel and my specialized rat-hunting dog Drake, we prowled the grain room and knocked over cabinets and snuffled extensively tracking the enemy. Drake made up for being enormous and slow moving with his enthusiasm and unfaltering dedication. I made up for being regular sized and slow moving (and still a little bit conflicted about going into the rat killing business) by giving Drake part of my sandwich and telling him to do his best. Some days we'd catch one still squirming in the T-Rex trap and, unable to kill it myself, Drake would dispose of the evidence.

So eventually this brings me to today. Me versus 2 baby rats, looking up from inside the old freezer we use to store grain. They were trapped and they knew it. What they didn't know was that I too was trapped, caught between the necessity to kill the rodents and my inability to directly harm the little fury beings -especially when one gazed up at me, scrunched his tail and scurried into the corner in fear.  I had reached this point in the war on rodents not actually doing any of the killing myself, effectively distancing myself from the guilt of killing another living creature (I exclude mosquitos and cockroaches from the category “living creature” they fall under the category “detestable monsters of doom”). But today it was down to me. With its high walls, the freezer was too big for Drake to climb in and finish the task. So I grabbed my shovel and threw aside my increasing sense of guilt and apprehension and...stood there looking at them for a good long while. However, as with any moral crisis, eventually you have to stop pondering and just get on with it (or so I told myself as I questioned whether or not I was really any better than the rat), and so I struck, silently apologizing and hoping that all rats go to heaven. Then with the help of Hannah, our new working student, we drowned them in a bucket of water.  That last part sounds…excessive when you type it out, but at the time it made perfect sense.  I had killed two rats with a shovel and felt terrible about it but naturally thought everything would be better if they could do some more dying inside a bucket of water. Which turned out to be a great solution and I easily returned to barn chores with a clear conscious because I knew that although it was unfortunate to kill them, rats didn’t go away on their own, didn’t listen to reason and didn’t belong in the grain room. That carried me happily through about four minutes of the afternoon until I heard a small voice inside my head telling me about their parents, Bob and Susan, who happened to be vacationing in the grain room freezer and now had no kids to their name. Thanks to me.  Full blown moral crisis had returned.  I realize rats don’t have names and don’t have with the same emotions and ability to reason that a human does, and in a lot of ways are simply a nuisance. So why do I feel guilty about the death of an ugly four legged sponge eater but have no trouble eating a steak at dinner? Because the immense distance between eating a perfectly cooked steak and killing a cow makes it easy for me to ignore the realities of where my food came from and the deaths and hardships that occur on a daily basis to allow me to live my life in the modern world.  This alienation from what we consume allows us to ignore countless uncomfortable realities. For instance, the fact that most of the impoverished inhabitants of Fiji, where Fiji Water obtains its “water untouched by man,” don’t even have clean drinking water. So the conclusion I have come to is that, in feeling guilty about the rat but considering only rarely the negative effects of nearly everything else I consume, I’m a hypocritically guilt ridden rat killer. But instead of wallowing in rodent induced despair I am going to take a good long look at where, without even realizing it, I am wielding my shovel and inadvertently striking at animals, at the environment, at people I do not know but invariably effect.  And in the end, I’m still going to have to kill rats (but maybe I’ll stop with the posthumous drowning…)