after months of talk, finally action. you are witnessing the re-birth of RATKILL. for those of you who have been with us from the begining, thanks for your loyalty. for our newcomers, RATKILL started as one man's quest to rid his home of rats before his son was born. today, it is the pulsing heart of a community of like-minded men, women and children who want to keep rats in check! our manifesto does not call for ridding the world of these vermin, nor for torturing or even killing them inhumanely. history has long pitted man against rat and the modern age is no different. march forward with us on this noble journey!
HOW IT ALL BEGAN!
it really all started the day my office phone went dead. the house line worked fine and downstairs, where there is another office line, things were still working just fine too. so i climbed on the roof and checked every connection, looking for where the short might be. it seemed strange that my phone line should so suddenly stop working. after a frustrating hour of checking all the wiring on the roof, in my office and where the line comes in from the pole, i decided to pull some of the wiring through the wall. that's when the war began. the wire was intact outside the wall, but as i pulled through the wiring that had been inside the wall, it was chewed up with many of the wires left bare and exposed. rats! what if it had been an electrical wire? or were they going to wait until i replaced this wiring and then chew through it again?
for months, i'd occasionally heard the rats in my walls. sometimes the dogs would bark at the walls and increasingly i was finding rat turds in the kitchen cupboards. i had put out a few traps, but now i realized that i'd been turning the other cheek long enough. these rats weren't playing nice anymore.
ridding my home of rats became priority number one. i bought two electronic "zapper" traps, 10 old-style wooden spring-loaded traps and 2 spring loaded-cable tube traps. i experimented with various forms of bait and asked friends and neighbors for their input. eventually, using peanut butter i started killing rats.
then, one night in the jacuzzi behind my house it all changed. as i talked with a close friend, there was a rustle in the bushes behind his head. i looked up, and silhoutted against the sky four feet from his head, was none other than a large rat. "man," he said, "if i had my pellet gun, i'd pop that one." we talked about it for a minute or so and then, another rustling and a second rat emerged. this was too much! we talked about courses of action. he, arguing for a pellet gun, me for traps. eventually, it became apparent that pretty much any trap was going to catch birds, possums, cats and a lot of other things besides rats. a pellet gun it would be.
a few nights later, tired of waiting for the rats to turn up and eat some peanut butter i put out, i decided that i should set up a web cam and monitor it while i worked at my computer. when i saw a rat, i could jog down the stairs, pump the rifle and pop one. soon, friends and neighbors were telling me their own rat killing stories -- i was amazed by just how many people i knew had actively hunted or even shot rats.
the first step was to put the rat camera up on the internet so friends could watch and call me when they saw a rat. then, as those friends shared the cam with others, i posted an explanation of what the camera was for. so friends could see, i started posting time-lapse movies of the rat action they had missed the night before. and then, well, i bought a url and decided that this was much bigger than me and some friends. there was a whole nation of rat killer and would-be rat killers that needed a place to come together; and thus, ratkill was born.