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I Caught Little Chef!
Last night I found myself in a remarkably Ratatouille predicament.
It is rare that our cat Rudy brings an animal into the house in anything but either a dead, or mortally wounded condition. Last night we were hanging out in the basement to escape the upstairs heat (Seattle houses don’t have AC). We kept hearing a bunch of commotion upstairs so I eventually went up to find out what was going on, and found Rudy in the bathroom batting around the cutest little rat I have ever seen – and believe me it’s not easy to see a rat in the context of it infesting your house and consider it cute, but this little guy was cute. There wasn’t even a scratch or visible wound on him.
What Would You Do?
Have you seen the movie?
Well I have, and it was a tough decision. I knew what the CDC would would want me to do. I knew what the City of Seattle would want me to do. I knew what my neighbors would insist that I do.
I couldn’t do it.
I apologize to everyone in Seattle, but I couldn’t do it. I made a bargain with Little Chef, carried him a few blocks away to a vacant lot and let him go.
Now, I really hope to see some new and innovative dishes at a certain local restaurant in the coming weeks.
So how did you catch it? That would be the hardest thing for me.
I have to agree Ratatouille was fantastic. What amazes me about Pixar, is not just the animation, but the stories. As a father of two, I’m well versed in animated movies, and there are a lot of bad ones.
Fortunately, it was in the bathroom, which left it very few escape options.
I plopped a bathtub drum toy over him and slid a magazine under it, then transferred him to the jar over the tub (where he wouldn’t be able to escape if I dropped him) .
You are such a softy! That rat would be in the rat afterworld if I caught him in my bathroom. You have 5 positive rat karma points accumulated however.
Dude.. it’s a field mouse (note the ears). Not a rat. You can feel good about letting the little fellow loose.
City dwellers. Sheesh!
Now, I could tell you about RATS.
Stefan, I hope you’re right!
I did score 12 out of 12 on this test:
http://www.ratbehavior.org/QuizRatOrMouse.htm
steve
Oh.. and here I was presuming that photo was the real beastie.
Never mind.
Yeah, it’s him.
The angle is a little odd, but i think that this is a baby rat. The shape of the snout says so to me. Also, he was quite a bit larger than any mouse I have ever seen. The base of the tail was pretty thick.
Not that I really want to go around trying to convince the world that I have rats in my house ;)
steve
I just caught a little mouse living in a rarely used three drawer chest of drawers in my sun room. He had quite the sweet three story bachelor pad. In each drawer he had made up a nice completely separate use space: the top drawer being the bedroom with lots of toilet paper bedding, the middle drawer the bathroom, and the bottom drawer the pantry with lots of seeds stuffed away. It was so brilliant I had to let him go, to use his home design charms on the ladies.
Don’t eat anything with capers in it.
Haha! That’s hilarious. Good for you. It’s amazing the coloring is just right and he seems to be pleading with you. Did you get any head nods?
Did anyone else get Kevin T. Keith’s movie reference? A hint, it’s from a remake of an old sci fi/horror film classic.
Such a little cutie…though my husband would not agree. He has done away with 2 such critters in our house over the last 2 weeks. Despite my pleadings to let them go. Our 2 left little fennel seed-like droppings, so I am assuming they were field mice. Which makes me feel even worse. But he was insistent, saying that our crawling daughter would be munching those up.
Tom H –
Yeah, I do remember a movie where the health inspector is arguing with the chef along the lines of “capers or Rat droppings”
What was the movie?
s
It’s a Dumbo rat, i had one as a pet called it Rolo, cute little things.