This morning, I was looking out my bedroom window, and I saw a fairly large rat sauntering through my backyard. He didn’t seem to have any sense of urgency about being out in the daylight.

A little while later, I heard our houseguest Moochie at the back door.

A few weeks ago, Mooch thanked us for our generosity by depositing a dead rat at our doorstep, so I knew he had at least some latent predatory instinct left in him.

I let him in, and he trotted over to his waiting breakfast. “You’re not doing your job very well,” I said to him. “I saw a rat out there dissing you.”

After he finished his breakfast, Mooch strolled back to the door and made clear his desire to go back out. As I opened the door for him, I said, “Now go get that rat, OK?”

A short while later, my wife Paula opened the back door. Mooch trotted back in, and deposited the offending rat in the middle of the kitchen floor.

There was only one real problem with this–the rat was still alive. It bolted for cover along the baseboard of the kitchen cabinets.

Paula herded the vermin toward the back door with her foot, screaming. I ran in and managed to corner it in our pantry. I pinned it down with a mop handle. As it squealed in displeasure, I yelled, “Hand me some tongs or something!”

Paula brought me a set of salad tongs. I reached in and grasped the protesting rat by its head, and pulled him out of his hiding place. Then I did the only thing that came to mind: I flung the rat out the back door.

The rodent flew in an arc for about thirty feet, and landed on the trunk of my neighbor’s Nissan like a sack of wet rat guts. It rolled off and landed on the pavement, unmoving.

After cleaning up the rat blood in the pantry, I went to check on Mooch. He was resting himself on our bedroom floor, giving his paws a light grooming.

“I guess next time I should be more specific,” I said to him