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DORP1111 wrote:

> Anyone else have any lurid tales of heroic rats?

This is not really about *heroic* rats, but...

It is very long, and lacks a bit perhaps in real visceral
tastelessness. It is, however, the most sadistic, cruel,
cowardly thing I have ever done to helpless creatures.
I still chuckle thinking about it, almost fifteen years later.

         RATS, MISSED                  
         ------------

PROBLEM:
--------

I had a snake, and feeder rats cost three bucks, so I decided
to buy three or four and see if I could breed them. They lived
in a 20 gallon aquarium in the back room. I threw in lumber
scraps for them to crawl around in, shavings, fresh water, 
good food. A great environment for 6-10 medium sized white rats.

There was usually a litter of pinkies growing. The snake
ate one adult a week, so the numbers stayed pretty constant. 
Individuals never had time to grow too large for him.

But things went to hell, of course. Three litters showed
up at once. The snake got sick and wouldn't eat for a
month. By then, the three litters were almost ready to breed,
and the adults were getting pretty damn huge. But I still only
had one snake, and even when he started eating again, well,
he wasn't going to catch up. Ever.

I had to get another fishtank. I built a nice enclosure for the
snake, and used his old tank. Ever the idiot, I ignored sex
in dividing the colony.

The babies had babies and the adults had more babies, and
suddenly I had somewhere between forty and sixty rats. I asked my
pet store if I could sell them some rats, but they only bought
from breeders.

I finally tried to seperate them by sex, but it was a hassle, and
I guess I missed one or two males, because soon the girls all
had babies again. 

Whenever I cleaned an aquarium, I'd put all the rats in an eight
quart casserole pot. This was the only thing they couldn't gnaw 
out of. After one on the bottom died from heat exhaustion during
this procedure, I couldn't do that anymore.

The whole thing was out of control.

I now had at least fifteen huge rats, all too big for the snake.
At least 50 mediums, and 40 or so pinkies. I couldn't clean
the aquariums anymore, the filth was horrible.

I found two near-term females and in desperation brained them 
with the end of a 2x4. The little fetuses inside kept wriggling
for a disturbing length of time.

Somehow the pregnant females must have been the stabilizing
factor in that horribly overcrowded society, because the next
day, the rest in the 'nursery' tank went cannibal. There were
pinky fragments everywhere. Headless, gutless, limbs only, 
heads only. I dumped the females all into the 'bachelor' tank
and cleaned up the massacre. I probably couldn't have assembled
more than eight or ten whole babies from the remaining parts.

I didn't care about the horrific party that must have ensued
when the females got tossed in with the surly, combative males.
I had decided that there would be no next generation.
Cannibals.

MEANS:
------

Towards the end of this mess my brother got his air rifle
mail-order. It's an RWS .177 cal. Model 54 Air Master, with a
specially designed 6x18 RWS airgun scope, model 800. This
package is about as far as you can reasonably take an airgun.
It has a built in kinetic recoil compensator, sophisticated side
cocking system. It's German, OK? Most air rifles fire at 600-800
feet per second. This one goes 1100+. Fast as a .22 bullet.

I had been hearing him in the back yard sighting it in for days
now, little *thwwwwp* *TCK* sounds over and over hundreds of
times.

His target area was two four foot long particle board shelves.
One lay flat on the ground, to hold the grass down. The other
was braced up against it with old dried out paint cans. This
provided a nice four foot by twelve inch high backstop to line up
paper targets on.

He was laying prone, about forty feet away, with a sand bag rest.

How accurate was this piece? Well, in gun parlance you use the
term 'tack-driver' to describe a miraculously precise weapon.
It's an extreme, fantasy concept. But my brother took glee in
demonstrating that this gun could literally drive carpet tacks
repeatedly, reliably into (or through) the 5/8 inch backstop.

Head shot on a rat? No problem. Eye shot, if it held still.

A short debate determined that the rifle would be a far more
humane method of dispatching the excess rats than the crudity
of the 2x4.

RESOLUTION
----------

Dawn. Traditional execution time for criminals. Well, midafternoon.
The grass was too wet to lay on earlier.

The first one went rather badly. I held the rat by the tail in
front of the target board. I was wearing a gardening glove so he
couldn't bite me. He didn't seem interested in biting me, he just
stretched his little rat paws down to try reaching the board on
the ground, only an inch out of reach. Perfect, spreadeagled target.
I hovered close over it, to see the results...

*thwwwp*

I didn't see the gore that hit me. It was just instantly there.
I dropped the rat reflexively.

"Fuck! Jesus!," I wailed, flailing at my face and smearing off the
pink gobbets, "Shit!"

My brother laughed at me. I didn't blame him. We examined the
target area, there was a beautiful tracery of blood behind the
impact point. The rat had been humanely dispatched. The entire
head was just *gone*.

After that, I just released the rats on one end of the board and
with a poke they would meander across it. Confused about the new,
unfamiliar, open environment, they would hug the 'wall', noses high
in the air, sniffing. Perfect, outstretched targets.

*thwwwp* *thwwwp* *thwwwp* *thwwwp* *thwwwp*

It had all the efficiency of a Nazi camp. Headless corpses were
held by the tail and neatly placed in the empty paint cans.

I wanted to have a go! I can handle a rifle, but had only fired
this one a few times. My brother, on the other hand, had gone
through half a ream of typing paper targets, maybe a thousand
rounds. He made the perfect decapitation shots look easy.

I sighted in as he grabbed the next rat. I could not believe the
view through the scope! It was like watching a big screen TV!
This *gigantic* rat wandered in, filling the entire field of view!

I centered the razor-fine crosshairs right under the ear and...

*thwwwp*

...gut shot it. Oops. There's a lot more juice in the belly of
those things, and it is much more colorful than dull pink brains.

"God damn you, you're supposed to aim at the head! He's still
alive, you shit. Reload, reload!"

You have to be careful with this rifle. The side cocker takes a
lot of force to operate, but you don't want to bend it wrong.
Then you have to painstakingly feed the tiny hollow point pellet,
right side first, into the chamber. Then close it, get prone, brace
weapon. I was fumbling the whole time, almost queasy. Meanwhile the
poor rat was crawling stoically away, dragging most of his innards.

The second shot blew him in half, inches from the end of the
board. The explosion of gore was more than all the previous
headshots combined! We examined the blood trail, the spray of
tiny organs. Humanity fled, and a wordless agreement was made.
No more head shots.

The bloodbath began. First, the idea was to see how quickly you
could reload and perform the coup de grace after a center hit.
Then we descended to calling body parts before aiming. I would cry,
"Hind leg!", or "Tail!", or "Spine!", or "JFK!" and it would be done.
My brother never missed.

Of course, I wasn't able to do the trick shots, I just concentrated
on center-of-mass. It was amazing how the shock wave could pull huge
amounts of guts through such a tiny exit wound!

We cheered at particularly high leaps, marvelled at bizarre
contortions, thrilled over fascinating pirouettes and flips.

Our hands got messy, even using the glove or a stick to shove each
ex-rat into one of the paint cans. So, eventually, we kept shooting
at each corpse until all identifiable rat-pieces had been blown off
into the grass. A new victim was tossed sliding into the blood slicked
killing zone and pasted before he could regain his feet to flee. The
only pause was to watch if one began gasping or convulsing in amusing
death-throes. 

When the rats were all dead, we dug the 'clean' carcasses out of the
cans, and drilled them all again. We thumb-tacked them to the vertical
board and cut them in half with pellets. The last shred of skin was 
always the hardest to hit.

It was pretty ugly for a humane execution.

AFTERMATH:
----------

The shelves were a gore caked ruin. Teeth were imbedded in the wood.
Unburst eyeballs rolled like tiny red marbles through pooled ichor.
Fragments of fur, meat, guts, and limbs were glued down with muck or
scattered all about. Blood dewed the grass for ten feet in every
direction. Entrails dripped off the bushes. One six inch strand of
intestine hung looped like Christmas tinsel on a tree branch eight
feet overhead. A smell of blood and rodent shit pervaded the area.

I got out the hose and a shovel. My brother left to disassemble the
rifle and clean it. Neither of us spoke.

END

ObRegret: This was a sad, cruel event in our lives that we still don't
talk about much. My only wish now is that I had left the target boards
in place and poured a generous layer of clear acrylic over them.

-FLATUS M