RATS are on the rampage in towns and farms, apparently. Nothing new in that: when my family was farming many years ago, we used to get spells of rats invading our farm.
What’s the best way to get rid of them?
Well there’s poison of course, but my parents didn’t like it lying around the farm.
Traps? They’re a bit hit and miss. Gassing or smoking them out of their holes is not really an option either.
Shooting can bring success if you’re patient and you’re eyesight is up to it. And the good old farm cat can be very effective too, as we discovered when we suffered our own plague of vermin.
The rats on our farm made such a mess. They were in the corn stacks and in the “cwt torri” (cutting shed). They made holes in animal feeds sacks and left their droppings everywhere. They gnawed holes in doors and there was a distinctive stench around the place.
One dark night my mother went into the food shed and put her hand into a galvanised metal food bin. As she felt for the scoop she felt something hairy moving.
She fetched a torch from the farmhouse and returned to shine her light on collection of six young rats which had entered the bin but were unable to jump out.
That was enough: we had to do something.
A friend suggested the best way was to get some cats. “I’d rather feed cats than rats,” he said. A week later my father returned from his regular Sunday stroll with a cardboard box containing eight cute, cuddly kittens.
My mother, two brothers and I fell about laughing when we saw what he’d brought home: he wasn’t a cat lover but had been given them by two friends on different farms.
Within a few months, when kittens had grown into young cats, the master plan began to take shape. One night, as my father did his late-night rounds, he heard a scuffle on the yard, followed by the sound of a squeal and of a shovel falling.
He came back to the house and said. “I think one of the kittens has caught its first rat.”
The following morning’s daylight confirmed his prognosis.
It turned out to be the first of many kills. Our cat population increased to 14 and the rats were soon cleared out.
BEFORE the war, when I was a toddler living on our inner city dairy farm in Liverpool, which was surrounded by terraced houses, my father and his neighbour, dairyman Richard Swinbank, decided to use ferrets and terriers to rid their rats.
When the ferret was placed high on the shippon’s wall, the fleeing rats would jump down into the waiting jaws of the lightening quick terrier.
But one evening, after a successful rat-catching session, the ferret went missing.
They hunted high and low but when the ferret failed to emerge they retired for the night.
The next morning an ashtonished Ritchie Swinbank discovered the ferret dozing contently in his kitchen more than half a mile away.
How did the ferret get there? How did it find its way home among the city’s rows and rows of houses?
Richie thought my father had furtively returned it, but he hadn’t. The puzzle was never solved.
