RCReptiles.com

[deborahbroadus]

It's been and amazing start of the day!!

I went down stairs to check on everyone and noticed that there was rat food all over the floor in the rat room. I then noticed some puddles of water.

I checked the puddles and discovered that either an rat or ASF had chewed though the tube (just enough to get water not enough to flood the floor). I replaced the chewed tubing and set about discovering which of these pests had escaped.

The rats seemed fine...agiated, but nonetheless they are all present and accounted for.

I didn't think the ASF would be the culpurits (they are after all in STEEL bins)



but..when I checked on them, this is what I found!



Since my ASF are semi-tame, I didn't think it would be a problem rounding them up...and it wasn't!! Looking around for something to catch them with because they were between bins (on top of the food in the second row) my eyes fell on my shop and vac! If these were rats, it would never have worked!! but thank goodness ASF do not have the body mass of a regular rat.

I used my shop and vac to suck each one to where I could reach it and dispatch it. Luckily there were only 4 in that bin and they hadn't had ratterlings yet. I couldn't feed them to my snakes because they may have gotten into the poison that was on the floors.

All's well that ends well.