Life without Penny

Life goes on, after Penny's death, but we still miss her. Walking has stayed as a part of our daily routine, because of the Covid pandemic and the lockdown that says we can only leave our home for an hour a day. Of course, if we can only go walking for one hour, we want to do it! We did think that without Penny to galvanise us into action, we might not walk, but the pandemic has motivated us to get out.

Gardening is one of my great loves, and in many ways we are keenly aware of Penny's absence. For one thing, I can put down compost and not worry that she will be there like a shot to gorge herself on the delicious half-rotted stuff.

But... the rats have realised that Penny-the-Killer isn't around, and they are munching our plants to the ground.

We walked in one of Penny's favorite places the other day. (Well, every place was loved by Penny.)

Way back in 2012 we felt irritated that one of our short-cuts had been fenced off at Quarry Park. Well, now we see that it was a great idea to fence the area off, because the boring expanse of grass has been replaced by a lovely planting.

Great news!

Today, after more than six weeks of anxiety, we received the welcome news that the second CT scan of Penny's body showed no changes in the 'spots' that had shown in the first CT scan four weeks ago, so the specialist vet has classified them as benign.

Hooray!

So now we need to keep resting Penny and give her a while to get over the anaesthetic from the last scan, and then it will be time to decide what to do about her torn cruciate ligament.

In the meantime, we are restricting walks to a gentle stroll in the evenings. We try to limit it to ten minutes, but if Penny seems happy we let it go a bit longer. Tonight we explored a new dog park near us. It was so tiny that in normal times we would have thought it unsatisfactory, but at the moment it suits us fine.

One way that Penny has been keeping herself occupied is in hunting for rats in the straw-bale vegie garden.

Sometimes when hunting rats you have to brush through quite a few spider webs, but that doesn't stop Penny staying on the job.

Penny is a good ratter

This evening Penny killed another rat. But this time she took a minute to kill it, rather than a couple of seconds, as she did last time.

This rat was in the same place as the last one she killed, under our make-shift water barrel. I had been startled by a rat leaping from a tree to the ground on the other side of the front garden, and decided to let Penny come out and scare it thoroughly. (I'll freely admit I'd rather scare them away than kill them, but I do realise we can't have rats breeding indiscriminately in our garden.)

A tail wave, slow, from side to side, is the sign that she's hunting.

She scared the rat out of its hiding place, and I would have sworn it ran down the side, past a locked gate, to the backyard, but when we headed for the front door to go inside, Penny darted over to our water barrel (a 240 litre wheelie bin). The slow tail wag began once more, and scrabbling at the bottom of the bin - even whining.

What to do? I want to get rid of the rats and I don't want to poison them. But I don't want Penny getting bitten by a rat, and I'm not sure it's good for her to kill.

Well, I decided to empty the water out of the bin and at least see what was under there.

While I was starting the submersible pump and spraying water on our parched front garden, Penny sat there staring, circling, waiting. And trying to dig under the bricks supporting the bin.

Finally, when the water was low, I heaved the bin forward, Penny leaned in and the screaming began. It was so sad. I know we can't have rats running around. (On the other hand, why not, if they stay out there in the garden?) The rat took about a minutes to die, I would say, and it seemed like a lifetime. (Well, for the rat I guess it was.)

I let her bat it around for a minute or two, and sniff it, but when she took it in her mouth, that was too much for me and I told her to 'leave it' and her other human took her inside to have a few treats. Then it was my turn to screw up my courage and smash the rat with the shovel to make sure it was definitely dead, no longer suffering.

One more chance for Penny to come out and sniff it, and see it deposited in the bin, and she went inside again, so we could persuade her to drink and so wash her disgusting-looking face. Ughh!

I guess I'm still feeling conflicted about it all. But at least there's one less rat in our garden stealing our fruit and eating our vegetables.

a dog hunts rats

Penny has been taking it quietly lately, because she seems to be limping quite badly at times. We've been sticking to short street walks. I think I might have overdone it by taking her on a two-hour walk in the Upper Yarra Valley recently. (But she had a great time!).

We'll go to the physio next week to see how her recovery from cruciate surgery is going. And we've started doing her home therapy more regularly. I think we had become complacent, even though we have been told her leg will never be the same as it was before she injured it.

But today she spent her time rushing down the back steps to check out some intruder in the lush growth in our backyard - growth that is the happy result of all the lovely rain we've had lately.

I think we have rats in the garden once again. She stalked them (or it?) around the garden beds for ages, her slowly waving tail the usual indication that she was on the hunt. It was good to see she was using all four legs to go down the steps, but she did hop the last step on three legs.

Penny kills a rat

Warning - photos of rat killed by Penny - might be disturbing to some.

We have rats in our garden and I hope they don't come inside as the weather gets colder. One of them, at least, won't be venturing into the house, because Penny killed it today. I'm feeling quite conflicted about this, because I deliberately sicced her onto the rat.

A few times previously we've come across rats in the daytime and I've called Penny out to scare them off, not wanting her to actually kill them. But today, the poor little rat got trapped by her and I had a choice - would I stand by and see her kill another creature, or would I call her away? While I was wrestling with this ethical problem (and shouting through the open front door for someone to bring a camera), Penny preempted my decision and grabbed the rat. There was one heart-rending squeal and there it lay at our feet. Hopefully instantly dead - but I couldn't in all honesty say painlessly, which disturbs me.

I know we don't want rats around, but they are also living creatures who feel pain and fear, and I hated to see this one die.

It was quite disturbing to see how efficiently and quickly Penny dispatched it.

And then she was left with the problem of what to do with it. She sniffed. She looked around. She sniffed. She looked around. I wondered if she was asking herself why this toy wasn't entertaining any more. Who knows what a dog thinks?





So we called her in and I took the even more disturbing step of chopping it with a shovel to make sure it wasn't still alive and suffering. It will take me a while to foget the horrible feel of the shovel chopping into that furry little body.

Would I do it again? I'm not sure. Maybe. In one way, I think it's better than condemning the rat to dying of thirst, which rat bait does, or possibly injuring it in a rat trap but not killing it outright.

And I also wonder if rats perhaps get bad press, and whether we can just live and let live as we do with other creatures.