Labour-saving Note of the Day, 1924

[mme_hardy]

 854.  How to Discover a Dead Rat.  To locate a dead rat in a room catch half-a-dozen blue bottle flies and slip them into a glass jar.  Let the flies out in the room where you suspect the rat is and sit down whilst they fly round.   Within an hour they will have scented the rat and all be buzzing round one spot.   That is where your rat is.  You can then take up the board and remove the pest.

 

Ah, our close-to-the-earth ancestors.   How natural they were, with their simple homely remedies.

Comments

[movingfinger]

I am sure a terrier could also be used for the same.

[mme_hardy]

Yes, but how often does one have a dead terrier behind the floorboards?

[neadods]

*giggle*snort*

[legionseagle]

If it's met Superrat!

[sollers]

Terriers, alas, cannot be relied on. One of mine killed a mouse a bit too enthusiastically, and I found the body in the bathroom.

I found the head a week later, courtesy of my own nasal passages.

[ironed_orchid]

This tends to be more of an issue if you use poison.

If you use cats as your method of pest control, you are far more likely to find the rat in the doorway to your bedroom, or in your shower cubicle. If you have a really good cat, you may only ever see the rats' tails.

[mme_hardy]

IMHO the ideal cat drops the non-tasty bits of the rat neatly into the compost heap.

[ironed_orchid]

That would be ideal.

[neadods]

The ideal cat stops playing with her germy new toy and presents it to you proudly for praise.

Sherlock... is not an ideal cat.

[legionseagle]

Incidentally, I'm fairly certain that your last line appears, almost word for word, in Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in Boat (published 1889) showing that certain habits of mind - and the desire to satirise them where they appear - are almost timeless.

[mme_hardy]

Or that when one has produced a phrase one is particularly proud of, one has probably plagiarized it. In my early 20s I was working on a poem based on the conceit that everybody is pregnant with a skeleton, and only realized partway through that Hardy had already done it, in nearly those words.

[sara]

Is #853 how to catch half a dozen blue bottle flies and get them all into a jar? Because I would like instruction on THAT.

[nanila]

I would also like #855 to be "How to get the blue bottles out of your house again once you've disposed of the rat". O.O

[mme_hardy]

#856 Getting the Smell of Gin out of your Breath before your Husband Gets Home.