|
Mar. 10, 2010
By Milli Gilbaugh
NORTH LIBERTY LEADER
|
| Milli Gilbaugh |
|
|
The other evening, I watched most of a television program about the Bubonic Plague and the Black Death. Often thought of as the same disease, there are definite similarities and differences between the two. I never did hear if the people who produced the program came to any conclusion on the matter, but I do remember that rats seem to be seriously involved in the whole thing. The theory goes that the plague was (is) spread not by the rats themselves but by the fleas that live on the rats. I say "is" rather than "was" because, even though we think of it as a problem from centuries ago, the disease still exists. Fortunately, we have effective ways to treat it in modern times.
All that really doesn't have so much to do with what I have to say here as the fact that seeing all those rats they used on the program (modern rats, incidentally, since there were no medieval ones available at central casting) dredged up a few memories of rats I've had dealings with during my lifetime.
My earliest memory of rats has to do with rats I never actually had any contact with. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing them. I heard about them, though, and since I've always had an over-active imagination, just hearing about them may have been worse than actually dealing with them face to face. These were the rats that resided in the horse barn on my grandpa's farm located near Perry and Woodward, Iowa. Before World War II, my grandfather, his sons and hired man did a big share of the farming with horses. Two huge draft horses, a white dappled one named Dick and a roan called Bill resided in a drafty, gray weathered horse barn, along with the essential hay, straw, oats, harness, etc. required for their lives and labors. My cousin and my Aunt Opal, who lived there, and my big sister, who lived to bedevil me, had warned me to stay away from the horse barn.
"The rats are bold and will bite," my aunt said. "Those rats are as big as cats," my cousin said. "Rats will chew off your fingers and toes and crawl down your throat and choke you to death," my sister said.
I stayed away from the horse barn.
There were cats on the farm - many cats - but they preferred the cow barn where they were treated to squirts of fresh milk twice a day. My uncles assured me that there were no rats in the cow barn.
My high school biology teacher tended several white "lab rats" which were part of a lesson on nutrition. Classmates took turns mixing the feed and weighing and measuring the rats to see what effects their various diets had on their growth. When school was out that spring, she sent the rats home with some of the students to be cared for over the summer. We had an assortment of pens and cages on hand because, over the years we had lived on the acreage, there had been a steady stream of all kinds of pets. The rats I adopted were quite happy living in an old aquarium in a shed until summer got really rolling and the days were humid and breathlessly hot. My mother suggested the rats be housed in one of the airy rabbit hutches which was currently unused. Built to accommodate big, white domestic rabbits, the hutch failed to contain the rats. They escaped the first day - perhaps the first hour - by enlarging the crack between two boards in the back wall and were never seen again. I must confess that I didn't grieve over my loss. The biology teacher had moved on to a different school by September and nobody seemed to miss the rats at all.
During the first few years of marriage, we lived in a charming little cottage in the woods near the river in Iowa City. There were lots of mice standing in line to sneak into the house when cold weather arrived each fall, but we didn't see any evidence of rats, though I'm sure there must have been some, as the property backed against a strip of Coralville where there were several restaurants within walking distance. A neighbor had warned us that rats were known to be attracted to the area by the smorgasbord of garbage they generated.
Years later, when we moved to the country, we learned the hard way that a trailer full of horse crunchies, cow feed and laying mash would be a virtual magnet for any rat within a mile of the shed where it was parked. Even after the grain had all been removed to a better storage area, the rats continued to maintain their own civilization in a warren of tunnels beneath the dirt floor of the large shed. Years later, when someone else was using the shed to house baby chickens, they were mystified by the fact that many of the chicks were disappearing. Careful observation and investigation revealed that the rats were kidnapping the chicks and dragging them down into the tunnels, never to be seen again.
Rats!
|
|
|
