How to kill a rat

One of the funniest travel accounts of the country is “An Englishwoman in the Philippines” by Campbell Dauncey (1906). Her comments on Philippine life and the American colonials in 1904 are an engaging read. She described Manila, Malacañang, and William Howard Taft who made a return visit to the Philippines as US secretary of war. She poked fun at everyone and everything in deadpan British humor that did not amuse an American who had read the original book scanned by Google. On the first chapter is handwritten: “The English should stay Home!”

Dauncey’s domestic concerns may be over a century old, but the things she wrote home about remain with us today: rats, mosquitoes, cockroaches, lizards, etc. Her housekeeping notes from Iloilo reminded me of my mother, who shared the same fondness for cleanliness and napthalene, and whose well-stocked, clean, organized, and locked pantry was raided by insects. She could have learned from Dauncey who had all shelves and surfaces of her dispensa or pantry wiped “with petroleum, an excellent precaution against the numberless and extraordinary animals with which one has to share the house.”

“I got tall glass jars for protection against cockroaches, and tins to keep mice off, and wire-netting for rats, and napthaline to astonish the scorpions and spiders; and last, but by no means least, a good strong padlock for human beings!” Dauncey wrote.

The Englishwoman complained about all sorts of insects, especially ants, which she disliked dead or alive. Furniture had their legs in vessels of water or paraffin to keep ants from crawling up for food. She particularly hated the sight of dead ants in her jam, butter, tea, and coffee, but what she did fear were cockroaches:

“The cockroaches, by-the-bye, are the size of mice. They are the most evil brutes I ever saw, besides being a constant source of terror and worry. You will hardly believe this, for you know that I never mind touching any animal—mice, worms, toads, slugs, earwigs—and how I have so often been laughed at, and even sniffed at, as rather an unpleasant young person, because I have no repugnance to taking them up in my bare hand, for after all they are only poor animals, and infinitely nicer to touch than many perfectly respectable human beings… Well, when it comes to these cockroaches, I confess that I have a genuine horror of the great red, evil-smelling brutes, with their horrible bulgy eyes and their long moving red antennae… They breed in the cesspits and prefer manure to any other diet… Ugh! They make one shudder… I have even seen men who have been here for years turn quite sick when a cockroach lights on them, and as for the average woman, she screams outright, and many white women faint.”

My mother claimed that she could smell a cockroach 10 feet away, and once on the scent would not give up until she had killed one or two. To keep my mother happy, my father claimed he regularly brought home a cockroach in a matchbox and let it loose in the bedroom to give my mother the thrill of the chase and a sense of achievement before she went to bed.

Dauncey’s solution? “I hang cakes of napthaline in the rooms, and put balls of it in all boxes, drawers, and cupboards, and they don’t seem to like napthaline, though they would come a thousand miles to eat ordinary insect powder, which is, apparently, just the very thing on which to bring up a nice little family of forty or fifty young cockroaches.”

Unfortunately, napthalene is bad for both insects, pets, and humans, so my mother’s weapon of choice against cockroaches is more ecological: a deft flick of the wrist with a tsinelas dispatches cockroaches quickly.

Now rats are more complicated, as Dauncey narrated: “There are a great many rats here, which eat up whatever the cockroaches don’t finish—that is, whatever is not in glass jars or tins… I invested in a large wire trap, which was set in the dispensa… The boys and the sota (groom) watched the trap with the keenest interest, but never a rat would get into it to oblige them. Now, however, while I was writing this, Domingo came in, beaming with the trap in his hand, and a huge grey rat in it.

“‘What are you going to do with it?’ I asked. ‘Are you going to kill it?’

“‘Si, señora, by pouring petroleum on the rat and setting it alight.’

“He was astonished and obviously disappointed when I peremptorily forbade this horrible rite, which the Filipinos have learnt from the Chinese, who think that the poor, agonised, blazing animal runs away with the ill-luck of the house.

“Then he suggested boiling water, and was again disappointed and surprised when I didn’t join in this spree either, and went off quite gloomily to carry out my orders—to find something large enough to stand the trap in so as to drown the poor beast as quickly as possible.

“Nothing could be found, till the sota fetched a tub from the stables, and this I made them fill with all the bath water—fresh water being far too precious to waste, even on sentiments of humanity! They collected all the water they could, and finally the flood reached the top of the cage, and though the sight of the rat struggling made me feel deadly sick, I waited till he was stiff and cold, as I did not know what cruelty these ‘little brown brothers’ might not indulge in if left to their own devices.”

How to kill a rat? There are many ways.

(Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu)