Escapity

[womzilla]

nellorat doesn't seem to have mentioned this on her journal, so I shall.

As I was just finishing mowing, the mail arrived, including a package I'd been looking forward to--a Barnes and Noble shipment containing Evolution Control Committee's new album, Plagiarhythm Nation, Vol. 2.0, which was recommended to me by the Mistress of Groovitude, Sarah Ovenall. So I rushed inside and sat down in the living room to sort through the mail.

From my chair (we all have designated seats in the living room), I have a good view of both cages of female rats. I noticed that Missy was peeking out from the big wicker ball in the main cage, and I said to her, "Are all of you hiding in the ball?" Since she couldn't actually answer me, I had to supply my own answer: no.

The big cage has an open bottom and rests in a large metal pan. It turns out that when I changed the shredded-paper litter in the pan last weekend, I had managed to put the cage on top of enough paper that the rats could burrow through the paper between the bottom of the cage and the pan. Four of the five were at loose in the house.

Now, as nellorat noted on her journal, this ratscape happened (via a different egress) two weeks ago, too, so I was moderately prepared. I immediately scooped out paper so that the cage would sit flat on the pan (so that Missy wouldn't escape and so that the others wouldn't, either, when we caught them and put them back in) and set about the task of finding the others.

It didn't go very well this time. After an hour of moving the couch around (and generating an amazing pile of the things which had slipped under, behind, or within it over the many moons since we last moved it ), I barely managed to recapture one rat--Connie, the escape artist. Quelle irony. I discovered that she was actually hiding inside the couch, which I hadn't realized was possible. So I put her back in the cage and, unfortunately, had to leave not too long after to go for comics and NYRSF. With three rats still on the loose, I set up the humane trap (which did a fine job with Millie, the last escapee, last time) and set out.

I met up with nellorat in the city around 9 PM and came home. I heard one of the escapees rustling around in the couch, so we took the back cloth off of it, and after about fifteen minutes of hide-and-seek, managed to catch Cinnamon. Back into the cage. Then we watched the West Wing season finale--boy, do they know how to layer on a cliffhanger, or what?--and then went upstairs.

Remembering a trick which had proven remarkably effective years before when we had a 'scapity hamster, we brought Dr. Butch down into the living room to try to lure the two remaining girls to the trap by force of personality (and pheromones). As nellorat lay on the bed in my study playing with Rufus and listening to his favorite song (a techno remix of GIR's "The Doom Song" from Invader Zim, I heard some rats scuffling in the living room. I rushed downstairs and...

saw Connie climbing on top of Dr. Butch's cage, trying to get in, and then saw that Millie was back in the cage of her own free will. Evidently, I had done an inadequate job of re-securing it.

I managed to grab Connie and block Millie from re-re-escaping. We took out all of the paper, put the cage level on the metal pan, and put everyone back where they belong. Dr. Butch still sits in the living room, an attractive nuisance; Sookie, we hope, will fall prey to his seductive charms any second now and all will again be swell.

Other pet note: supergee mentioned to me this morning that he had forgotten to stock up on food for Courageous, and would go and get some today. When I went into the garage to get the lawnmower and weed wacker, kittikins mewed most pitifully at me, and there was a lump of uneaten food in one of her bowls. Since it's been about two weeks since her last steroid shot, I assumed this meant that she had left food uneaten from yesterday, so I went in to get her a carton of "cat milk" (a milk-based product engineered to not upset a cat's digestion; it's intended as a treat, but we use it as a substitute for food when she reaches the point in her steroid cycle when she can't eat). Poured it in, she dove for it, slurp slurp meow. Supergee got home about fifteen minutes later (while I was working on catching Connie) and, in the conversation which ensued, we established that indeed he had fed her this morning, and she had eaten it all. So she managed to scam a full carton of cat milk from me. I couldn't be happier for her.

Update, Thursday morning: Sookie is still loose in the living room--supergee saw her on top of Butch's cage, but she fled as we approached. She also managed to get a yogurt drop off of the activation lever in the trap without setting off the trap; at nellorat's suggestion, the yogurt drops are now imbedded in the peanut butter which is also on the activation lever, so it should be impossible for her to get them without setting it off.