Rat chews off nose of baby
 

There's a video on CNN detailing it.

Man, do I hate rats and mice. As Zulu and I can attest, it is very difficult to sleep in their presence.

My dad has had rats invade his garden, so he has set out a trap that we got at a chinese supermarket. He has caught and killed many of them. Good work.

I think I am going to do the same. I don't have particular reason to think I have a lot of rats around (although I did see one loping thru our yard a year or two ago). But I do have a particular hatred for them since my mission, when I often employed hand-to-hand combat killing them in our mission shacks.

Please join me in fighting this rat plague! Person who kills the most rats gets a custom title!

I encountered a giant rat in one of the first apartments we moved into many years ago. Not wanting to resort to hand to hand, I grabbed the nearest weapon, a cheap Wilson tennis racket (heavy). The bastard almost escaped me with a sweet juke move, but with the help of the racket and a decent backhand I stunned him long enough to deliver a deathblow. I share your hatred of rats.

I consider using a racket as "hand-to-hand", or better put "hand-to-paw".

Do gophers count? In 2006 I caught 6 gophers in my lawn/garden with the Maccabee gopher trap - it is the best gopher trap on the market. All other brands of gopher trap suck compared to the Maccabee.

In 2005 I caught 8 gophers so hopefully I was having a long-term negative effect on the gopher population.

My father in law sits on his balcony and shoots them with his rifle. He lives by the sea in Bellingham.

When I was a kid my friend's family had a sort of boutique dairy operation (just a few cows) and the dairy barn was plagued with big rats. Every time we would try to chase them they would disappear under a wall. One day while we were doing this my friends little brother happened to be in the tack room on the other side of the wall and saw them come pouring out of a hole on that side when we had chased them out of the dairy area. This gave us a bright idea. We took some 1x4s and hammered 3" nails through one end so we had a sort of spiked club. Then my friend and I stationed ourselves in the tack room and waited while little brother and friends chased the suckers out of the dairy area. The rats came prancing through the tack room hole to be met with our spikes of doom. It was very, very messy, but oddly satisfying, even though we didn't get them all. We tried this again a couple of times, but it only worked once.

To tell you the truth, my memories of the whole affair are a little hazy, except for the visceral feel of club meeting rodent. These are the sorts of things city kids miss out on altogether.

I LOVE rat stories. My favorite is my wife's, actually. When on break from college she served drinks at this little greasy spoon by the sea. Once she scared a rat out in the kitchen, it ran over a broad hot grill, its feet sizzling, and then leapt over the boiling deep fat fryer and escaped.

Good story, but very disgusting. I can only imagine the smell of burnt rat feet.

It seems like every mission has a few rat infested apartments. There was one mission apartment in a pretty nasty area of Taipei that made a great hangout for the neighborhood rat population. For some reason, the elders who lived there had never taken any steps to evict these rats.

When I moved in, we used every commercially available product to fix the rat problem and over a period of about two weeks we were cleaning up dead rats, three or four a day. The smell was so bad we ended up moving shortly after we fixed the rat problem.

sometimes the rats are so bad that you just give up. This happened in my first area. When we would turn the light out in our shack, the rats would scale the plywood walls and come in. We killed them for a while, but it was quite nasty disposing of them and resetting the traps, esp. after you have already gone to bed.

Well the guy who replaced me was very dilligent, and ended up killing over 50 rats with the rat trap.

I can't imagine how happy the Kombai tribe would have been to catch 50 rats (for those of you that watch the Discovery channel).

not a rat story, but on friday we were down in Hurricane golfing, and their were jack rabbits all over the course, this one took off running, a guy we were playing with picked up a rock and hit it on a dead sprint right in the head killing it instantly, It was a great throw, this lady in one of the houses on the golf course was on her balcony and started clapping.