Every Rose Has Its Thorns

I remember there was a children's book about a king that liked cheese, but mice were eating it.  So he got a cat.  That took care of his mouse problem, but he didn't want cats around, so he got dogs.  The dogs made the cats leave, but he really didn't want dogs.  So he got an elephant, which got rid of the dogs, but what do you do with an elephant?  So he re-introduced mice which again started eating his cheese.  A very circular story about unintended consequences.

The owner of the farmland across the road sold his farm to a developer who is going to make a big subdivision out of it.  We talked about that in an earlier post.  We weren't thrilled about this, but what can you do?  The developer plowed the land. The farmland that had laid fallow for years and had grown up in weeds chest-high was now plowed smooth.  This displaced every critter that had made his home there, including rats.  They all, I presume, packed their luggage and moved on over to our place.

Our cats that were 16 years old both died, leaving us with no defenses.  The battalions of rats flanked us and in blitzkrieg fashion, stormed over the line, setting up a command post in our attic.  One day Tricia said, "Kyle, our telephone isn't working."  We called a repairman and he discovered that rats had eaten through the telephone wires in the attic.  What a mess!  So we got these two with the quickness.

It took them only a matter of weeks before we found them entertaining a rat and then killing it.  The Rat Killers are working!  But there's always unintended consequences.

Our youngest son began to complain about some bumps in his arm and this concerned us. We took him to our family doctor and Benjamin was diagnosed with Cat Scratch Fever.  So we have our rat problem solved, but now we have cat scratch fever.  So, I guess now, in keeping with the story line of the book, we need dogs and then an elephant?  I think not.  We'll take the cats to the vet and if the cat scratch fever doesn't go away, we'll use antibiotics.