Yesterday I found a rat on a suburban road. I was driving home, taking a blind turn. The rat was just before the bend, left side of the street. He sat a quarter of the way into the road, not in the middle but close enough that he would be crunched against the pavement if he didn’t move soon. And he showed no signs of moving.
I pulled over in front of someone’s driveway, got out with my keys in hand, and jogged to the rat. He was large enough that I briefly wondered if he was a baby possum. Red-brown fur. The rat was breathing hard, heaving air out of his little body. But he didn’t run away when I got close, which I knew was very strange. I cooed to him, typical baby talk for cute animals.
I guessed he was sick. I remembered that it’s stupid to touch a sick rat, but I felt like I couldn’t abandon him to be smushed. So I ran back to my car for a fabric tote bag and turned it inside out to pick him up, the way you pick up dog poop. Before I returned to the rat, another car drove around the blind turn. Their tires rolled very close to him, and I was anxious.
Photo by Tambako The Jaguar.
I brought the rat home and put him in a small cage that I found in the backyard, along with a dish of water, some rabbit pellets (we have pet bunnies), and a paper towel for bedding. I left the cage next to the woodpile by the barn. I checked on him a couple of times that evening. At roughly 10:30pm, he was dead. I looked at him again in the morning. Yup, dead.
In the afternoon I cleaned up. The weather was gorgeous, fresh yellow sunshine heating my back. I carried the small corpse down the hill and laid him next to a patch of wild calla lilies. (We live right on the edge of a regional park.) Goodbye, little rat. I tossed the leftover rabbit food over the edge of the hill, because I didn’t want to risk contaminating the other critters. I put the water dish next to the kitchen sink. Threw the paper towel in the trash. Washed my hands thoroughly (which I did after every interaction with the rat).
Now I feel sore and sad. Not sore like being miffed, but sore like a bruise. I know it’s trivial, one little rat who was probably poisoned for being a nuisance. I realize that I was an idiot to handle a sick animal from a species notorious for communicating diseases to humans. It just didn’t feel right to leave him.