At War With The Rats

"A primordial battle between man and beast..."

The old rabbit barn in the back of our field had a shelf that was great for storing hog feed on. It was also a perfect hangout for rats. Once we realized they were out there rat hunting became a sport for me and the kids. You might be a redneck if... your favorite pastime with your kids is shooting rats in the barn.

We would wait until it got dark and sneak out there with my million candle power spot light and a .22 automatic rifle loaded with rat shot. Once we reached the right place inside the barn the spot light would go on. There were usually two or three surprised rats that would scatter in different directions. If the shooter was fast enough they could get two of them before they disappeared through the walls. My daughter and oldest son both enjoyed our little nighttime hunts. It was always exciting and we would come back with tall tales of our adventures in the barn. My wife would just shake her head and say something like, "That's disgusting."

After killing about ten of the pesky rodents I realized they were coming out of some stacked cinder blocks on the back side of the barn. I didn't really like the idea of having an entire colony of the creatures living behind my barn, so the very next Saturday my brother and I had an old fashioned rat killin’.

I had watched one of the rats scurry down a hole under the cinder blocks, so the first thing we did was throw a smoke bomb in the hole to see what would come out. My brother had a CO2 BB pistol and I had the .22 with rat shot. Once the smoke drifted into the hole rats started running everywhere. I was overwhelmed by the number of them. From that point on it was sheer chaos. Both of us were shooting, yelling, screaming and laughing at the same time. The kids, who were outside a safe distance away, cheered us on. Everything was so crazy. It's a wonder one of us didn't get shot. I remember hearing BBs bounce off the wooden walls and more than once I felt the sting of ricocheting rat shot hit my skin. It didn't take long for the smoke to clear and the rats that we missed ran back in the hole. My brother and I were left standing there, wide-eyed and out of breath.

The adrenaline was pumping, but I was out of rat shot and my brother was almost out of BBs. So we picked up the next best thing, shovels, and decided to try it again. Another smoke bomb was tossed and more rats flooded out. We must have looked like escapees from the mad house running all over the barn, shovels swinging up and down, relentlessly pursuing the horrified rodents. "It was a primordial battle between man and beast, the pre-historic instincts of a bygone era pushing us forward." (Quote from Jack London’s Call of the Wild, but it seemed to fit here quite nicely). Once the remainder of them had scurried back in the holes it was time for some demolition.

Piece by piece the cinder block hideaway was torn down. I would grab one block at a time and quickly toss it off to the side. More often than not a rat would either run back into the barn where my brother was waiting with his widow-maker shovel or it would dive into a cinder block and disappear into the concrete fortress. Eventually, one by one, they all met their fate.

When it was finally over we had used up a whole box of .22 rat shot, one CO2 cartridge, an unknown amount of BBs, sweated off at least 20 pounds, surely burned 50,000 calories and killed 26 rats. Where can you find a better exercise program than that?