Boe’s Life: Chasing the Rat
By Danielle Criddle
The scent of rodent is thick in the air; the breeze makes it difficult to determine the direction that it’s coming from, your owner is telling you to find the rat, you must.
This is what goes through Boe’s mind when he’s on a “ratting” job.
“He’s been skunked four times,” Samantha Garrett, 20 years old of
Boe, the fearless rat-hunting Jack Russell terrier, and his human, Samantha Garrett (Matt Heufner photo 2008)
The terrier, although small, is a working dog bred to hunt and catch rodents that burrow into the ground.
The want ad in the paper read that the terrier was for hire and he’s ready to work.
Samantha Garrett has been training the 11-year-old terrier for his job since he was five.
“I’m offering an alternative to poisons,” Garrett said of the services she and Boe offer.
“Rat poisons are made to be tasty to animals,” she said while recounting an incidence of a family pet getting into the poison and dying.
Rodents harbor many diseases including Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS), rat-bite fever, eosinophilic meningitis, and murine typhus to name a few of the more fatal.
Telling of a job they went to, “out in Amalga there was a farm and they had gophers and rats that were just burrowing in all the fields and Boe got them all,” she said.
“I’ve taught him ‘we don’t chew on dead animals,’” she said of the actual job, “he kills ‘em and I pick them up and throw them in the trash.”
“She’s gotten hate mail over this,” Garrett’s mother, Robyn Stocks said about Garrett and Boe.
“It’s a natural thing,” Garrett said of the Jack Russell Terrier, “anything with ‘terrier’ in the name was designed to go after rodents.”
When Boe isn’t working he enjoys the luxury of being a house pet, “we hang out and watch T.V., go for walks, he really likes car rides,” Garrett said.
“We’re still looking for new clients,” Garrett said of her free service, “he really likes to work.”
When the weather warms up a little more and rodents start showing up in garages, basements, and fields, you can be assured that Boe will be there with his owner Samantha Garrett to get the job done.
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