My house seemed alive with rodents, as I discussed on this blog three weeks ago. I was then planning to resort to mass executions, by way of rat traps.
My traps, baited with delicious gobs of peanut butter, were haughtily ignored for the first two weeks. It was summer. The weather was warm. The neighborhood was rich with falling nuts and fruits and other tasty rodent food. Life was good, and the little guys preferred to dine al fresco at dawn and at twilight. They turned up their rather prominent noses to peanut butter, served on an odd metal tab in the darkness of my basement.
But the seasons change. The air became cooler. The outdoor goodies became scarcer as our super-abundant squirrels and rabbits gobbled up everything in sight, with the squirrels also squirreling away provisions for the long winter. As for an epicure who's missed a few meals and gobbles down a Big Mac, my peanut butter began to have an appeal.
A lethal appeal, as it turned out.
The first two casualties were not the rats I had anticipated. They were two cute little mice who succumbed several days apart. The first was still conscious when I discovered him, with the rat trap's powerful spring about his middle, rather than his neck. The trap had obviously caused severe internal injuries, but he didn't struggle as I approached. In fact, he seemed to look at me hopefully, as though I had come to rescue him. I once again anthropomorphize. In a sense, I did rescue him, by drowning him in the toilet rather than forcing him to die slowly and in pain.
But I didn't feel good about it.
The second mouse was already dead when I discovered him.
But the scrambling in the walls continued until this morning. I discovered a dead rat who had barely freed himself from a trap but had bled to death a few feet away. He was a huge rat, larger than any I'd seen before. He was quite ugly, a thug among rodents. He was not a cute rat, like my nephew's pet rats. I felt little sympathy for him.
And yet, I empathized with the cute mice. Felt really bad about their deaths. What had the rat done differently, aside from being larger and uglier and making more noise? Nothing. Nothing at all.
And I began thinking about my different feeling between the mice and the rat, and how that plays out in how we judge our fellow man. When I see a photo in the newspaper of a cute child who has died in an accident I feel much worse than if it were a photo of an ugly adult. Especially, an unshaved adult with messy hair. And then I reflect on how studies show that employees who are tall and reasonably good looking succeed more often than those who are short and plain looking -- even when appearance has nothing to do with their job functions.
I try not to be superficial in my feelings about people, and yet I unconsciously judge those I meet that way all the time -- or if not "judge," feel sympathy for. What about those who are less introspective than I am, and have even less hesitation to judge "a book by its cover"?
I admire folks who are able to, say, work in soup kitchens or provide free counseling to the homeless -- and while doing so are able to welcome each client as equally deserving of acceptance, of being treated and and respected as a fellow human. To see an ugly rat as a potential saint and a mouse as a possible thug, however cute he may appear.
Philosophizing aside, I suspect my house is now rodent-free. I'll be listening for any unwanted sounds inside the walls as the day passes. Whether from rat or mouse.
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