Posted on 11/19/2018 6:32:35 AM PST by C19fan
Around 72 or 73 a guy came through our town with with an exotic animal display. He had a koala, some snakes, different lizards and such.
The thing I remember best was the Vietnamese rat. That dang thing was AT LEAST two feet long excluding the tail. The tail itself was about a foot long.
I remember my buddy commenting that our troops in Nam were fighting the VC, the NVA and the rodents.
We’ve had Weims through the years. The guy we have now (rescued a 5, and he’s 12 now) is a rat catcher. We have fruit rats in the yard and he can find them and snap their neck in a second.
Weiim before this caught birds. He could catch them in flight, or if they were sitting in our hedge, he’s just reach in and get them, and Weim before that it was squirrels, she’d stalk the squirrel for 1/2 hour just waiting for it to get far enough from the tree, then she’d cut off their return.
All the same breed, but each seems to have had their preference.
My family had a black and tan rat terrier (formally, a Toy Manchester Terrier) when we were kids. It was smart as a whip, energetic, and with a great personality. My mother even trained it to get my two younger brothers up in the morning on command.
That one looks long, but very scrawny/skinny.
I worked at a chicken farm in South Jersey in the early 1970s. Every once in a while the owner would have a old buddy bring his Rat Terriers around to sniff out and chew up rats. We would follow them around and help them flush out the vermin. Great times!
Good doggie!
Go to any rail-yard where they are transferring grain and you'll find rats that make that one look tiny by comparison.
I have seen rats as big as that good doggie!..................
I saw a rat by a dumpster at a 7-11 store once that was as big as that dog!...............
I don’t think those exist.
There were some monster rats in Thailand. I saw them first hand!
Now reconsider! Tony Blair is a lot bigger than 21 inches.
Supposed to be some pretty big ones in Sumatra, too (a tale for which the world is not prepared).
A rat hunt meant dressing in long pants, arming ourselves with baseball bats, golf clubs, spears, and a pellet gun or two, getting the neighborhood dogs together into a pack, and then sweeping through the orange grove late on a Saturday afternoon. This had been done so many times that all it took was agreement among the older boys to hold a rat hunt and the arrangements quickly fell into place.
I realized years later that the entire business was like many paleolithic hunting parties must have been organized. The funny part was how our mixed breed pack of dogs behaved. They worked remarkably well together, intuitively getting what we wanted of them, finding rats in patches of weeds and in orange trees and corralling them for us to kill.
Every now and then, an excited dog would kill a rat and sometimes eat them. That seemed natural behavior for a German Shepard, but it was quite something to see it from an old and pampered Cocker Spaniel. Looking back though, we likely would have done much better with a small pack of rat terriers -- but we would not have had as much fun.
“You can find bigger rodents in the Fire Swamp.”
I don’t believe they exist.
L
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