There’s a rat in the compost, what am I gonna do?

By Ruth D’Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener The Wildlife Gardener has been performing the annual ritual of emptying and turning the four compost bins. Unfortunately I’ve been forced into the ritual because some other creatures have been excavating the scraps bin, as you can see:

Lifting the bin revealed a network of tunnels inside the matured compost:

Rats? I’ve heard scamperings that sound too heavy to be mice. Would mice drag all that compost out to excavate such (relatively) large tunnels (4 cm high)? Overnight, shredded bank statements disappeared from the bin (presumably for bedding rather than identity theft ” I know rats are clever, but could they work out my account number and sell it to the Ukrainian mafia?). There’s food, if the rodents follow a raw vegetarian diet: I’ve deliberately kept cooked scraps out of the bins so as not to attract rats. So I’m not sure, from the evidence, what’s living in the bins: rats, large mice or naked mole rats. (Well, I’m not in Africa, so that rules the latter out). I hope it’s not rats in my backyard. I actually quite like the Rattuses norvegicus and rattus: they’re intelligent, engaging and adaptable. Shame about the Weil’s disease, fleas, habit of eating birds’ eggs, and aggression, which leads me to a very Surrey story of how much we love our pets down here in the Home Counties. A while back, my friend Alison went to feed her daughter’s rabbit Minnie. There was a strange scrabbling noise in the shed and she thought nothing of it. As she opened the door she could hear a bubbling, wheezing, snuffling sound coming from the hutch. Switching on the light, she was confronted by a scene straight out of Quentin Tarantino: blood was splattered forensically around the hutch, dripping through the wire onto the floor. Minnie was nowhere to be seen, but still the wheezing continued, like the unseen gurgling horror outside the front door in’The Monkey’s Paw‘. What would Alison find in the hutch? She gingerly opened the bedding door and Minnie, deeply traumatised, sprang into the run splattering further fresh blood. Alison recoiled as she realised that half of Minnie’s face had been torn away, and was hanging off. Rat attack! Rats had been trying to steal the rabbit food, and Minnie, being a characteristically feisty doe rabbit was having none of it. Unfortunately the rat’s incisors got the better of her and left her in a very sorry state indeed. Working swiftly before her daughter came home from school, Minnie was soon on the vet’s emergency list. “Hmmm,” said the vet, who had seen rat bites on rabbits before, but not this extreme. “We can put her to sleep for