The Vermin Rant

Actually I do have a rant that is certain to upset someone out there I can ramble off about tonight. It's about vermin and no it is not directed towards Carolyn or TB recent posts although some of the comments from their blogs did have something to do with it.

Ya know back when I started blogging about this dirty, labor intensive adventure in attempting to get a real working small farm going and geared towards sustainability there seemed to be a huge pool of rough and tumble "tell it like it is" bloggers out there (Male and Female) doing the same thing or near enough who understood the real world because they lived in it. Seems these days those types are becoming more and more rare and many of my old favorites have went silent. That's really too bad and I have noticed a real increase in Pagan sentiments and ideas to go along with that decline.

Back then the occasional sweet hippy type save all the animals bloggers were kinda quaint and rare enough to be cute.... Looks at Kymber. Then the wussification and Facebook dumb down connection somehow made it's way into the world of blogger and now I see comments about how people use live traps for rodents and discuss where they should release em and crap.

That has to be the most idiotic thing I have ever heard.

Ya know what? You people who want to call yourselves preppers or survivalist or whatever listen up. One rat can kill you in a grid down situation. We are not preparing for a cute disney video of Bambi in the woods here while you paint yourself blue and dance around fires, we are talking about life and death. Obviously you have never grown the feed you need for you own animals and stored an entire Winters of it in a bin only to discover a rodent has been raiding and ruining that grain. Where there is one there is more than likely several and they can easily eat or ruin all the feed you have available in short order. While it may comfort your delicate wussified feelings to not kill it, not put out poison for it to take back to the nest and eradicate it's disease infected offspring or release it into the wild knowing you can always go buy more grain right now. Maybe you ought to look at every situation like you would have to if the stores were all closed and the trucks didn't run.

Is that miserable flea infested, disease carrying, dropping factory rodent worth 2, 4, 6 bushels of grain you need to feed your cow when you ain't growing any more for several months? Is it better to feed your goat grain full of rat turds that has been peed on because some other small critter might happen on the poison you put out?

Which incidentally as I have said before rat poison has regurgitates in it and rodents can't vomit. Neither can my Mother come to think on it but her's is because of a surgery procedure she had to have a few years back. So yes I wouldn't feed my Mother rat poison nor anyone else who has had whatever surgery she had.

Let's face it if you have ever opened a grain silo in January and saw it crawling with 100's or 1000's of vermin rats you will understand how dangerous treating these things like sentient beings really is. They are vermin no different than a plague of  locusts. If keeping small animals out of the poison is a problem then put it in a container that nothing can get into but a rodent. They make em actually or you can easily make one yourself. Personally killing a few thousand rats at the risk of a cat or two is justifiable collateral damage in my view but I have been poisoning rats for years now and never seen it harm one of the dogs or cats at all. One rat can easily become 100's in short time and pussyfooting around trying to trap the things isn't going to work. Right now you are banking on the rat colony finding better forage elsewhere because you have freezers, tubberware and plastic pails. When you need to store all your grain in a corn crib the circumstances change and it would be best to just make sure you never have to worry about a rat plague developing.

I can assure you if all you are doing is setting out some type of "Luv your Vermin" live trap the only reason you are not seeing more rats is because your neighbor is calling an exterminator. It isn't your piddly little attempts at vermin relocation making a difference.

Rats are not innocent little wild animals. They are dangerous and can get out of hand easily and very expensive to have around in a world with limited resources. Not dealing with them immediately in the most efficient manner could well cost you the lives of your stock animals, family members and your own as things decline.

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!