Now it's f***ing personal

The other day I walked into my greenhouse, perfectly relaxed and certainly not expecting anything bad. Imagine how p***ed I was when this greeted me:

It got worse from there...

...much worse:

Nothing left here!

Weirdly enough, nothing else was eaten, just these Astrophytum cactus — and there definitely are other tasty morsels in the greenhouse. I don’t “collect” a lot of plants, but I did collect these astrophytums.

I knew immediately who the culprit was. It’s always the same one. It starts with an r, has an a in the middle, and ends with a t. Let me spell it out: r-a-t. If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you might know that rats are my arch nemesis. They’ve done more damage in our garden over the years than anything else. Not just ornamentals: More than ¾ of the vegetables and herbs my wife planted in recent weeks have been gnawed down to stubs.

Poison traps aren’t an option because of Stella, and I don’t love the idea of live traps: What am I going to do with a trapped rat? Drive it to the county line and set it loose?

So I did what I typically do: Set out our electronic rat trap. When a rat steps on the metal plate inside the contraption, it gets killed by a high-voltage electric shock. All I have to do is dump the lifeless carcass in the garbage without ever having to touch it — no guts, no gore. The model we have (Victor M2) is even Wi-Fi enabled and comes with an app that tells me when a rat has been killed. I know, a bit ludicrous, but that’s what it does.

When I got up the next morning, I immediately checked the app. No kill. I was disappointed but not surprised. Rats are exceedingly wary of new objects in their environment so it takes them a little while to get used to the presence of a trap.

When I made it to the greenhouse later that morning, this is what I found:

That’s the same hollowed-out cactus you saw above, plus a nice addition. If that isn’t a middle finger to yours truly, I don’t know what is. F**k you, smart boy. You can’t fool me with your stupid trap.

Of course that’s silly anthropomorphizing, but it makes me feel better, so please bear with me.

I put my remaining astrophytums in a tray, including two that have some damage but may grow out of it, and hope to keep them safe from the voracious fangs.

Please keep your fingers crossed that I’ll catch the f**r soon. Sorry for the swear words, but that’s the mood I’m in.

Day 3 update: I added another electronic rat trap (we have two).

Day 4 update: Still no kills.

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