Drenched Rat
One evening last month, a Glover Park resident lifted the lid of her basement toilet to find a drenched rat the size of a 20 oz. Coke bottle scurrying around the bowl. She screamed, slammed the lid, stacked books on top, ran upstairs, and Googled the phrase “what to do about a rat in the toilet.”
The Internet advised lubing the toilet with dishwasher detergent and flushing, so the woman and her husband doused the rat with Dawn. “We did a flush, and we could still hear him scrambling around,” she says. “Now he was all puffed up and angry.”
An exterminator friend instructed the couple to smash the rat’s head with a broomstick. But the husband and wife, worried the rat would jump out of the toilet and bite them, declined the advice. They piled the books back on the lid.
The next day, they poured two cups of bleach into the toilet, and waited for the scrambling to stop. After a few minutes, they poked the rat with barbecue tongs. “He was completely stiff and totally dead,” she says.
The woman, who declined to be named, says she learned an important lesson from the incident. “You better believe I flush that toilet once in the morning and once at night,” she says. And the lid stays down.
4 Responses to “Drenched Rat”
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October 17th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Hey Jessica,
It’s Ben W. I have two suggestions for your readers with toilet rats.
1). If you kill your toilet rat, consider honoring it with a little Viking funeral. If done tastefully, it could be intense AND adorable.
2). If, like me, you think your toilet rat’s gone through enough already, and you don’t want to kill it, secure it in a sack and drop it off at the triangle park between Columbia Road and Harvard Street.
Good luck
October 17th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Hey Ben,
Thanks for the suggestions. But what, pray tell, is a Viking funeral?
J
October 17th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
From wikipedia:
A Viking funeral can mean burning a boat with a corpse, as a spectacular tribute.
October 23rd, 2007 at 5:33 am
No doubt the woman declined to be named because of the horrific cruelty she exposed the rat to. Don’t get me wrong, I’d hate to see a rat in my John, too. But bleaching an animal to death has got to be about the worst thing I’ve ever heard.