ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I’ve kept rodents of one type or another off and on for the past four years or so, and although small animals are notorious for things like cannibalizing their young, I’ve never had a problem with any of them eating each other. Not until yesterday, anyway. Tuesday night I fed the rats and gave them water and had a look at them and there were definitely two rats in that thing. Then last night I drank like a whole bunch of wine and had some chicken tetrazzini and my fuzzy logic kept telling me how much those caged rats would definitely enjoy some garlic bread with their rat nuggets or whatever. I put the bread in and closed the cage door and then I realized that I saw only one rat. Was the other one gone? I was puzzled at first, thinking it had escaped or something, but then I spotted a rat foot down in the bottom and was like OH MY GOD RAT IS DEAD and I looked closer and saw some rat innards and I was like OH MY GOD RAT ATE RAT. After I overcame my initial horror and finished another glass of wine, I went back and had another timid look and realized that A) I couldn’t figure out exactly HOW MUCH of the dead rat had been consumed but B) it looked like a lot and C) I didn’t really want to know anyway. I was too sickened by the partially eaten dead rat to even conduct a proper funeral, which is my typical procedure but which would have required excavation of the remains from the bottom of the cage, not to mention digging a hole in the yard and keeping the dog away from it. So poor old rat went out in the trash today, and I didn’t even look more closely this time, just dumped out the bottom of the cage and triple bagged it to keep other animals from joining the buffet.

I assume the rat was already dead before being eaten, god I hope so anyway. Holy shit! Anyway, the rats never wanted to eat each other when there were still two, at least I don’t think so. The thing that mostly surprises me is that the rat was eaten at all, when they have a steady supply of food, and that so much of the rat was eaten so quickly. The cannibal rat was the one who had a life altering trauma when it got lost in our couch for two weeks without food during summer of 2004, so maybe it was the previous experience with potential starvation that triggered such a violent survival instinct. Either way, rat didn’t seem to care that they had been friends, only that fresh meat was here and maybe it wouldn’t be later. Are rats the ultimate pragmatists?