No - I tend not to write about rodents, but I can sympathise with your problem. My invading rodent climbed into my SUV heating system. It then expired and left me with a $400 bill! We laugh about that one now, but rats are another problem. From my mother's experience, it needs a professional to irradicate the area - they are unhealthy and can cause problems to more than the flora and fauna of the area.

The problem -- and one I might get an amusing story out of -- is that my neighborhood is a seaport, a ferry port (I bet some of our rats came from Alaska or Vancouver Island), and the former Cannery Row of Bellingham. Rats have thrived here for at least a hundred and fifty years, without the professional rat catchers making much of a dent. My main focus will be to tell homeowners how to keep them out of the house and how to harass them in the garden. Who knows, I might even discover a was to keep them out of the neighborhood altogether. (Yeah, sure. Maybe I should get a fife and pipe them out onto the tideflats at a minus tide.)

An acquaintance had one come up through his toilet. He's now afraid to flush.

Oops.
Make that "I might even discover a way" instead of "was".

I figure every writer east of the Mississippi has written about woodchucks at one time or another. I have... ;)

Deer, deer, deer, deer....They get my vote for the most written-about animal east of the Mississippi. The problem that cannot be solved. They all but thumb their hooves at me as they pass by my windows each twilight to dine upon my shrubs.

In my opinion a 'was' rat is the best kind. Did you know that a pair of rats could be the head of a family of 15,000 within their lifetime (4-5 years)? That is a lot of rats. I had a rat catcher out once because a girl friend saw one in the kitchen and nearly had a heart attack, I had no idea there were rats, I thought is was a ghost. When they died from the poison they would stagger into view and suddenly go stiff, me too, it was quite a performance, the dead ones were certainly more evident.

Rats are everywhere, even in the finest neighborhoods. Nothing is funnier than seeing the unmistakable look of denial on the face of an affluent homeowner when he/she encounters one of those furry little bastiges feasting on leftover brie.

I know how fast they breed: I once raised rats to feed a screech owl I was rehabilitating. The owl had the run of the house, and I found out that an owl carrying a half-eaten rat across the living room causes quite a stir at a party. (The owl lived on top of a tall cabinet and it carried the rat around just to show off.)

Heh. When I was a teaching fellow at the science museum in Boston, we had a roomful of owls (great horned, barred, screech, etc.), each of which was fed rat "pinkies" that were donated by a local lab animal breeding facility. They used to send us crates of hundreds of the squirmy things every week.