My Banana Rat

I’m an animal lover. It’s no secret. I love all animals: birds, squirrels, kittens, fish, lions, dogs (especially dogs) and so forth. I wouldn’t hurt a fly, literally, I will not kill a fly, I can’t and I won’t. I try not to step on ants when I see them outside. I let a whole hive of bees live under a tree branch/root in my flower bed even after they swarmed me and stung the shit out of me because I knew they would be gone next year, which is now this year, and they are. But now, I’ve come to a crossroads of sorts in my life of pacifism and loving of animals. I have a critter. Not a pet critter. A wild one. In my kitchen. I’m not sure what it is. It could be a large rat, a small raccoon, possibly a possum, maybe even a monkey. I’m not quite sure. What I am sure of is that it eats no less than one half of a banana every single night. I have a banana hanger on my microwave which sits on my countertop and every night, something makes its way up there to snack on the bananas. And my “guard dogs” aren’t saying shit about it. Not a growl, not a bark, not even an attempt at eating it. I went to Home Depot to get a humane rat trap, because my logical mind says that’s what it is, but they only had lethal traps. The kind that snap a neck and the kind that their little teeny tiny rat feet and hair get stuck to. So I left empty handed. I haven’t replenished the bananas in days, since it ate the last of them, but I’m on the fence about whether to humanely trap it (because then where will I take it?) or if I want to just put it out of my misery and snap it’s cute little neck and ask the rat gods for forgiveness. This really has me losing sleep at night. Well, not really, but it is literally stealing my potassium. I just don’t think I can do the neck breaking trap. And what if I do buy that trap and despite my bad jokes it really is a monkey, a city monkey, and not a banana rat? I’d feel like total shit….