Can Anyone ID This Fella?

[DanStokes]

Found this in the yard tonight when I took King out for his late night walk. I think it's a plain ol' rat but maybe I'm missing something. The body is about 6" long not including the tail. No idea how he got dead.



Not used to seeing such things.....

Dan

[Deaf Bob]

Rat.. Had hooded ones growing up.. The coloring looks to be wild.. Hope it wasn't poisoned as dogs/cats that munch on poisoned rats get poisoned too..
Wood Rats will have a little more hair on the tail..
Looks like something might have bit it's rib cage?

[Beagle]

Rattus norvegicus... probably died from cancer. They seem prone to it. (Get it?... prone... pffft... sorry, had to.)

It's not real uncommon to see them that large here if they have access to plenty of water. Purina puts a lot of good things in the food people leave out for their dogs.

Three rats sit in a bar. The first rat takes a large swig of beer and says "I'm a badass rat. That trap in the house, I eat the cheese and use the trap for bench press.

Not to be outdone, rat number two drinks half of his beer in one swig and says "I'm a badass rat. I put their rat poison in the dog water and use it for a bath. When I'm done, I drink it."

They look at the third rat, who drinks his beer all in one swig, slams his empty glass on the bar, and says quietly. "I'm gonna go home and do the cat."

[DanStokes]

I wondered that, too - though I'm not planning a necropsy (animal autopsy) at this point.

I'll bag him and toss the li'l devil in the trash this AM.

Dan

[Dan Barlow]

Reminds me , last winter a rabit got hit , my friend puts it in a couple plastic bags and since its not near trash day in the neighborhood he puts it in the freezer in the garage and forgets about it till moving day . I'm unloading the freezer and I ask what's this ?

[Dan Barlow]

Found this in the yard tonight when I took King out for his late night walk. I think it's a plain ol' rat but maybe I'm missing something. The body is about 6" long not including the tail. No idea how he got dead.

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Not used to seeing such things.....

Dan

That sir is a chihuahua !

[67 Malibu]

Speaking of chihuahua's, my neighbors chihuahua is always getting loose & coming after me. Or anyone else that is in the area. He evidently thinks that his "territory" is quite a bit bigger than it really is. Once he even bit my ankle while I was mowing my back yard. Literally. Yeah, I know, "ankle biters". So a couple of weeks ago I am putting away the hose after washing something off in the driveway & he comes charging around the corner of the house barking at me. My house. Big mistake as I had a spray nozzle on the hose. I just turned the water back on & waited for him to look back around towards his house & then let him have it. Blew his little ass about half-way down my long driveway. He hasn't been back since.

[pdub]

HAHAhahahah!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I would LOVE to have done that!

Riding a bicycle for huge distance on the road so many years ago, it was the Chihuahuas that scared me the most. Not only do they not know how big their territory is, they also don't know how big they are NOT. Your leg can't reach down far enough to kick them from the saddle, they are too close to the ground. And depending on which part of the you or the bicycle they are after, you or the wheels, they could get tangled up in the front wheel spokes and bring you down for sure, that was always an abstract fear of mine.

[corvettedad]

Chihuahua? Catfish bait.

[silver_bullet]

....or, a Lugnut mid morning snack!!

[pdub]

Dan, I've been thinking about this. There's a structured way to analyze a problem or issue, cause and effect. The most recent overused corporate buzz term is "Root Cause Analysis." It's even an acronym, RCA. It's all over the map, everybody thinks that's the greatest thing.

The biggest thing to look at with RCA is what changed before the situation occurred. That's a great photo of a dead rat.

I've done the RCA process way over here, hundreds of miles away, and the conclusion is, that rat ate some petunias. And it killed him.

[DanStokes]

That is, of course, one possibility. Not ruling that out. Given that they've survived ME and me for several weeks we know they're probably alien spawn and can live thru anything and would probably kill anything stupid enough to munch them.

Or another possibility. A particularly nasty Jack Russell Terrier lives across the street. As DBob pointed out, the rat in question looked like it might have had a tooth mark in it. So maybe Ricochet the JRT nailed it and it scurried across the street where it ran out of adrenaline and sputtered to a stop. Knucklehead is WAY too slow to nail a rat and besides he'd want to play with it and smell it's butt - not gonna happen with a rat. So if it passed on as a result of canine intervention, it was Rickey.

Dan

[pdub]

I just KNEW I was wrong. Has anybody ever had that gut feeling, you do something that you know is WRONG? Of course, a terrier. That was not in evidence when I did Root Cause Analysis. RCA is the approved and perfect thing these days, but it apparently relies upon have all of the facts.

[Deaf Bob]

My dad loved my first Pitty, he would move boards from a pile so she could get herself a ground squirrel.. She would sit thete crunching bones while it screamed, dad would have goose bumps..

Best reason not to let Kingsford to play with an animal he did not catch himself is it might have been poisoned... Seems city folk are quick on the D'con, not thinking "down the line". Something else munching on it..