I really pissed off my flatmate today.
As I was walking to our kitchen, I saw something dash across the doorway. It looked like a rat, but it moved fast enough for me to wonder if my eyes were playing tricks on me. Both my flatmate and I have domestic rats, Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat. I immediately went to my cage and checked that all girls were present and accounted for. My flatmate's cage is inside her room, so I knocked on the door and asked her to check her cage. I got her out of bed; she'd been summoned to work by a phone call at 2am, so she'd not long got home. It turns out that all of her girls were there too. Eventually I managed to locate the mystery rat, with help from one of my girls. I'd been worrying that it'd escape again, and if it was a domestic, it needed to be caged, fed, inspected, and the word put out that someone was missing their vermin. Well, it turned out that the rat was a black rat, Rattus rattus. So I knocked on my flatmate's door again to let her know, and this time she was pissed off. She works for a living, does long hours, and I'm a dole bludger that twice got her out of bed. For a rat.
I really shouldn't have woken her up the second time. It wasn't anything she needed to know straight away. Oh well.
Hopefully Rattus rattus doesn't want to make a permanent home here. Putting out traps and poisons are a no no for obvious reasons, and trying to find someone who could lend us a humane trap would be a pain. Not to mention figuring out what to do with the little beastie once it's caught. It's an invasive and highly destructive species, but I can barely bring myself to kill cane toads. Rattus rattus and the Brown rat Rattus norvegicus are much the same size, but they are very different species with a nasty habit of attacking and eating each other given the opportunity, so they tend to not like overlapping territories. Here's hoping Rattus rattus decides the place is too crowded and moves on of its own accord.
The flatmate left not long ago, but I didn't see if she had her uniform back on. Wouldn't surprise me if she had less than the mandatory ten hours between shifts.
