Topical 9/1/2020

It’s a wild world when humans and four legged creatures compete. A Dangar Street reader reports that rats moved into his ceiling over the Christmas-New Year break. “They scratch and munch away in the middle of the night,” he said. He laid some rat baits which evidently didn’t do much more than add variety to the rats’ diet. He then set a cage trap in the ceiling and caught two rats in two nights. “But how do I dispose of them?” he asks. “I can’t ‘catch and release’, and I think it’s too cruel to drown them. I can’t open the door and hit them when they come out they move too fast.” However, rat problems pale into insignificance compared to the ravages of feral and non feral pests overseas. A former Narrabri resident living in Memphis, Tennessee, told Topical that squirrels were the enemy of his house. “They chew away on window frames and gutters,” he said. But in Germany weasels are the worst. The German weasel population is reportedly ‘exploding’ and they target cars. “They squeeze into cars and go insane, tearing everything to shreds,” said a biologist, Karl Kugelscafter. The weasels particularly favour the plastic hoses and tubes in German cars. Deterrents made from bear and dog urine didn’t work. Weasel vandalism to cars is now the fourth biggest cause for non collision car damage insurance claims in Germany. Last year there were reportedly 198,000 claims for weasel attacks on cars.