SOUTH DENNIS

TAKE THAT, you dirty rat!”

It’s been years since I’ve heard James Cagney say that on the silver screen. But where is he now when Nantucket needs him?

Nantucket is ending its long-running, 30-year, rodenticide program for a number of reasons, two being:

1) It will save dollars (lousy reason).

2) It’s not working (good reason).

It seems that the rats are becoming immune to the poison and breeding immune rats. When the dose is increased, the cycle repeats. Darwin was right after all. Now Nantucket’s super-rats are immune to anything short of a nuclear blast.

I never liked poisoning them anyway. Sometimes poison can get a family pet or other animal that just ate a poisoned super-rat. I like a direct approach. But firing guns in the house can get messy.

I use these electronic thingamajigs that plug into your electrical sockets and purportedly send a pulse through your house wires that critters don’t like. They make them for insects and rodents, and I believe that some of the newer ones are dual-purpose. They cost anywhere from $18 to $35 for a pack of two or three and are available at practically any hardware store.

I didn’t believe they worked till I installed them in my friend Kathy’s house in Arizona. Creepy-crawly things, such as scorpions, poisonous spiders, little snakes and rodents, are common out there and can flatten out and crawl under even a closed door and get into a house. Our neighbors, who were also skeptical, tried them and vowed they worked. So I got five, three for insects and two for rodents, and installed them throughout the house. Nary a single undesirable creature was ever seen in the house again.

So I did the same for my house in South Dennis, here on Cape Cod. First, I made sure neither type affected my cat, Sheena, as advertised, and they didn’t.

For some reason a few spiders showed up after I installed them here. One spider was from outer space. I heard Kathy yell “Help!” from the bathroom and immediately thought there was an intruder. I got into my Kung Fu-Twae Kan Do-Ju Jitsu death position and leaped into the bathroom. It was a hairy spider about 2 inches across that looked like a small tarantula. Neither Kathy nor I had ever seen one like this before. But I bravely dispatched it. Now Kathy is after me to fill in the machine-gun holes in the wall.

I would recommend trying these electronic plug-ins for pests. I don’t know if they work only against little mice and not rats, but they do seem to help.

Or you can try the Pied Piper. But don’t forget to pay him.

Solon Economou, a frequent contributor, is an engineer and Cape Cod-based writer ( capecodder1@hotmail.com).