The Wuff with the Smooth: Boomtown rats

As a fairly well-travelled individual, I’d like to think I’ve seen a few things. I’ve tried to learn a couple of languages, I lived abroad twice and prior to settling down around this neck of the proverbials, I had a three-year stint in Dublin’s fair city. I’ve also been to 14 different countries – 15 if you count Vatican City and 16 if you count the time the plane landed in Barbados when we were en route to St Lucia. I’m hardly Phileas Fogg right enough, but still, fairly well travelled.

However, as far as I’ve journeyed and as much as I’ve seen (I once saw a man crying for his mother as a goat chased him through a pub trying to bite him on the bum – although in fairness that was in Tipperary – and it was one of my friends), I have never encountered any madness like I regularly witness on social media. It seems as though every time I open an app, the great and the good are all trying to outdo one another with everascending levels of craziness. From bare-knuckle hill-billy boxing in Appalachia to cooking up a whole cow’s head in Vietnam, social media makes me realise that I am not as well-travelled as I could be. And have you seen those guys in the wingsuits flying in and around craggy mountains? Seriously lads? Would you be wise?

No, social media has taught me that the world is a scary place and perhaps I am better off not expanding that list past country 16. In fact, maybe I’d be better off building a wall around the house to keep the nutters out.

One reoccurring video for me on social media concerns the guys who take their dogs around the English countryside looking for rats to hunt. The initial ‘ratting with terriers’ video popped up on my feed some time ago and because I watched one video, the algorithm won’t leave me alone. The footage is all basically the same: Man lifts shed floor (or bale of hay or plank of wood) and un-earthed is a whole town of rats which initially tries to flee that is, until the terriers are loosed and the rats are stopped in their soon-to-be bloody tracks. The videos are a grim aul watch and I wouldn’t really recommend.

And yet… As I am convinced there’s a rat town in the ditch below my hen house, I may yet have to take matters into hand. That said, I’m not sure Waffle would have the terrier-like killer instinct – unless he whines them to death, which in fairness is certainly a possibility.

The reason I think there’s a rat town below the hen house is because I noticed a new hole in the ground one morning as I was out at said henhouse feeding said hens. The hole is bigger than something a mouse would make and smaller than a badger’s digging. Also, it is a known fact that if you have hens, you will attract vermin. Waffle too always seems to be interested in the ditch which, as fate would have it, contains an old door which I dumped there years ago and then neglected to retrieve. Man lifts door and un-earthed is a whole town of rats?

Short of sending for those English lads with the terriers, me and the Waff needed to man up (and dog up) and sort things out.

THE NEXT DAY

You should have seen the shape of us. I was in me wellies, work coat, thick leather gloves and woolly hat; as an afterthought I took the spade out of the shed in case there was any whacking to be done. For a laugh, one of the little humans had put an old Minnie Mouse T-shirt on Waffle (seeing as how we were rodent hunting) but this only resulted in bunching up around his shoulders making him stumble.

‘Little good you’re going to be if a fight breaks out,’ I told him. But Waffle only scratched at Minnie Mouse and shivered.

Honestly and truthfully, I’m not a big fan of rats. Their buck-teeth offend me, they stink and I’d be fairly sure they’re hoatching with the plague. Still, I needed to flip that door to check IF there was a rat town underneath and IF I needed to buy some heavy duty poison (or a flamethrower).

Approaching the door in the ditch, Waffle tuned into the severity of the situation and started up a high-pitched whine. It was as if he could sense the turmoil we were about to unearth and wasn’t one bit pleased.

At the last moment, I considered chickening out and simply laying down that poison I hadn’t yet bought. I was picturing flipping the door and recoiling as the wriggling hairy bodies dashed for their lives, buck-toothed, stinking and hoatching. Would they attack Waffle? Would they attack me?

‘Kite or bust,’ I told Waffle and, sticking the spade into the ground nearby for easy retrieval, I bent down and pushed my leather-clad fingers underneath one end of the door.

‘Right, yous fuppen baxters!’ I shouted and hauled upwards.

To be continued…