Rats, mealworms and smelt

It’s funny how the horror of snipping a wriggling mealworm in half suddenly becomes tolerable (at least for the one wielding the scissors) once you’ve progressed to segmenting a defrosted rodent.  I can now say I’ve done both as a Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA Wildlife Department volunteer, and, without a doubt, I prefer beetle larvae decapitation.

For months, I’d been dissecting live mealworms and cutting defrosted crickets with surgical scissors in order to accommodate the beaks of the smallest of the bird nursery fledglings. That was OK; Even halved, the mealworms kept up their writhing, and the little birds always seemed so thankful when swallowing the morsels. Then came a day when I was assigned to the courtyard shift, and I joined a college intern in preparing dinner for the raccoons and opossums. This proved an alien task for both of us.

Raccoons in recovery, it should be noted, eat a regimented diet of dry dog food, fresh produce and smelt, an appropriately named, small odorous fish. Each raccoon, depending on their size and age, is entitled to a certain amount of each of these ingredients, as stated within a “diet binder,” and that amount is then multiplied by the number of raccoons present in the enclosure with roommates sharing one or two colossal metal bowls “family style.” That particular day, we were dealing with six enclosures, each containing between five and eight raccoons.

The intern and I assembled the dog food and chopped carrots and apples into chunks to fill the bowls. Then she hacked away at a frozen block of smelt and I carefully counted and deposited the defrosted fish (or pieces of fish) she dislodged into each labeled bowl. I used my gloved hand to mix in the glassy-eyed stinkers, concocting a medley I hoped was both appetizing and pleasing to the raccoons’ palates.

This assembly line procedure went on for about an hour, and we had just managed to shove all the bowls into the fridge when we realized we had mistakenly followed the diet for adult raccoons – not juveniles whose diet requires less kibble and fish.

Out came the 10 or so dishes. And so commenced some frantic mental math as the intern and I recalculated each quantity of kibble and smelt, guessed how we had divided the original amounts among multiple bowls marked for each enclosure and then scavenged in the heinous piles to retrieve the extra. It wasn’t pleasant, but in the end, the raccoons had just the amount of grub they were supposed to.

I was about to leave for the day when I asked Patrick, the head of the department, about dining options for the opossums.

“Get a rat pup and divide it between the five of them,” he said.

I swallowed. Huh?

I found the rat pup in a bag in the freezer, his frozen white fur slicked back with ice. Attached to the fur were pieces of tiny pink rat hands that had snapped off his litter mates when they were individually detached from the frozen ball of rat bodies. 

Despite the extra appendages, our pup was pretty darn cute and looked more like a mouse than a rat.

The intern placed the rodent popsicle within a bowl of warm water, and we watched in silence as he floated around. Periodically, she would employ a gloved finger to dunk him into the warmth.

When the intern had deemed the body “soft enough,” I grasped the body with one hand and held it over a dish while the poultry scissors quivered in my other hand. I decided to start at the head and turned my own slightly to look away as I began to cut. The sinews were stringy and tough. I struggled to bring the blades together.

“Imagine you’re cutting fabric,” the intern said.

That advice actually seemed to help, and I successfully made it through all four cuts. The intern placed the five sections into five dishes and these we crammed into the fridge beside the raccoon dinners. I tried my best not to think about them when I ate my own that evening.