A Rat Tail Tale and Other Collected Animal Stories

Since I arrived in Paraguay, I have woken up to some strange sounds. From pigs screaming as they get killed to steam whistles at the sugar factory. Hearing people running around the house screaming like they walked in on a triple homicide crime scene, however, tops the list. One morning last week, I was off dreaming about bacon (and a number of other foods that I miss), when I was awoken by the blood-curdling scream of my host mother. My senses still felt a bit muffled and I couldn’t really see yet. All I could hear is the skipping record of her voice screaming over and over: “Su Cola! Su Cola!” Spanish for, “Its tail! Its tail!”

A bit of background on this story. We have a serious rat problem. We have three dogs in the house, but none of them have those feline instincts to hunt the rats. I suggested getting a cat, but quickly realized why that won’t happen after a cat found its way into our yard one day and the dogs nearly murdered it. For now, we are left with only one brutal, albeit effective, solution: rat traps. The first day that I saw my host father loading one up, I thought we might have a serious bear problem that I didn’t know about. These traps are the size of a pizza box, are all metal, and have serrated edges that look like they could sever a limb if one were to load the bait recklessly. We set the bait (which is, in true Saturday-morning cartoon fashion, a chunk of cheese) after it becomes clear that one is setting up shop somewhere in the house.

That brings us back to the current situation, where I am sitting up in bed making sure that I am translating what I am hearing correctly. That does mean “tail,” right? The first image that pops into my head is a terrible one: One of the dogs has wandered in from outside and, smelling that cheese, decided to have a little snack, and gotten its tail cut off. Luckily, what I found after leaving my room did not involve a dog. The rat, which I believe had some cousins living in the subways of New York (or perhaps Three Mile Island), had been caught with its tail in this bear rat trap. He was big enough to be able to pull the trap around behind him. The shouting of “Its tail!” that I heard was my host mother screaming into our lime green rotary phone, which she had pressed to her face as she stood peeking out of her bedroom door. My host father arrived minutes later and laughed as he realized what she had been calling him for. He would later explain that he answered his phone and only heard the same two words that I did. She couldn’t manage to say anything else. I won’t describe what happened from that point on, but lets just say the rat didn’t go on living much longer.

Paraguay has gradually erased any aversion I may have once had to all manner of bugs and rodents. I see this when I watch a rat scurry across the floor and it doesn’t spark any emotion. I occasionally flick cockroaches off my bed before getting in, and actually enjoy watching the lizards who live in my room (some of them have been given names). The one line that I have drawn (and don’t see being erased anytime soon) is snakes. I still keep my machete near my bed for those guys. There was a UYD volunteer that had a venomous Coral Snake drop on top of her mosquito netting last year, and killed it with her trusty machete.

My family finds my aversion to snakes hilarious, but I think their fear of frogs is even funnier. Paraguayans are sort of trained from an early age to be afraid of frogs because of the large number of poisonous ones that live in the country. However, the frogs around my site are just your standard, run-of-the-mill bull frogs. Whenever it rains, our area becomes overwhelmed with frogs, and my host mother has to hide inside whenever they make their way into the backyard.

Life with chickens, especially in my last home in Guarambare, really made me hate them. I explain to Paraguayans that in English, you can say someone is a “chicken” if they are easily frightened. They really do not live up to their name down here, as you can run up to one and shout, but they simply look at you and continue doing whatever it is that you are upset about (like pooping on your bag that you left outside). I don’t get angry at them anymore, I just smile and tell them that I look forward to eating them whenever they do something annoying. I think for some PCVs, being exposed to the slaughter of animals causes them to be more hesitant to eat meat. Having been exposed to how annoying chickens are, I think I enjoy eating them even more. Of course, they are not nearly as frustrating to be around as geese.

They only animal that I do (occasionally) feel bad about eating is pig. They can be pretty cute when they’re little. I haven’t killed one personally yet, but my family is pressuring me to do it when we eat one for New Years. We keep a group of them at our family’s farm, and I recently learned that two of the bigger pigs killed one of the dogs that lives there. Like my rationalization for killing chickens, that story is only helping my will power, since the dog they killed was one of my favorite animals I have ever met.

My favorite animal tale here in site is about a group of horses. There is a rumor around Concepcion that the municipality actually purchased a group of horses which they then let roam freely around the town so that they would eat grass and save money on mowing. I think when you consider the fact that the grass really only gets converted into a wetter and smellier version of its previous self, I can’t help but feel like this solution is not necessarily the most effective. Whether or not their origins are true, there does exist a large homeless population of horses. They roam the streets freely, and fill up the park nearby my house late at night. Most of them are huge, majestic white horses. One night I was walking back from a local restaurant with a bag of Lomito Arabe (which is basically Shawarma), when all of these hungry horses smelled my meal. Normally, I would not consider horses to be a very aggressive animal, so I didn’t worry when they all picked up their heads to catch a whiff of the food I was carrying. Then, as if collectively announcing a strike against their bland diet of grass, they started walking, then trotting after me. As I sped up into a jog, I was more amused than I was frightened. I was, after all, being pursued by a group of horses at midnight in Paraguay.

Life can be really strange here sometimes.

Tagged as: Asados, Dogs, Frogs, Geese, Horses, Lomito Arabe, Machete, New York, Pigs, Rats, Snakes