When we were kids, we had a few classmates whose families were “those” kind of people according to our mother. You know…the kind whose parents got food stamps and who had siblings that didn’t have the same last name. The kind who lived in trailers or falling down farm houses and wore Salvation Army clothes. When their names came up in reference to a birthday party or some incident at school, my mom would sadly shake her head and proclaim, “Those Smiths…that’s SOME outfit.”
You may call them trailer trash, low class, bog trotters, hillbillies or hicks. But my sister, at six years old, looked down her nose and referred to them haughtily as Outfit People.
Outfit People are the types of people who have vermin. You know…rats. However, as I lay in my bed this morning at 2:30 awakened by the screaming rats on the back porch, I realize that there are two possiblilities: Either rats are not only for Outfit People, or my landlord is, indeed, one of the Outfit People.
Yes, it’s true: rats scream. These particular rats are apparently having some ballroom brawl type of “discussion” over the catfood that my landlord leaves out all night every night to feed the neighborhood cats. Apparently, even after repeated difficulties with the issue, he’s too dim to realize that he’s also feeding every rat, mouse, possum, racoon, rabbit, skunk, and hippopotomus in the greater Boston metro area.
He puts down traps, he threatens to use poison (which we beg him not to do because of our five month old Jack Russell). He swears his oath of homeownership against the evil rodents that for some mysterious reason continue to plague him. He ruminates about how they got in, while contemplating ridiculous and time consuming hoops for us to jump through in order to keep them at bay.
And then every evening at 6:00 he puts out three bowls of dry food, three bowls of canned food, and enough water to make our own koi pond.
Meanwhile, he snoozes happily on the second floor. If the rats get in, WE deal with them. When they scream, WE wake.
Glue traps blow…they’re ineffective, not to mention cruel and useless. Particularly used in the landlord’s moronic fashion of placing them all in a circle in the MIDDLE of the basement instead of hiding them in corners where they might do some good. Poison is dangerous to domestic animals who might not be as obedient as they should be. Regular snappy-type rat traps? Do YOU want to do your laundry next to a three-pound rodent with its brains leaking onto the basement floor?
I’d rather use a humane trap and get the live animals out of the house (personally) than come across one that’s all squished and gross. Or worse, HALF dead.
And yes, I know that releasing the live rats outside just means they’re going to get right back into the house. However, how cruel should we really be to them considering they have the intelligence to outwit the lesser spotted landlord?
Even if the landlord IS only one of the Outfit People.
L