Knowledge

How does the Navy control rats aboard its ships while on long deployments?

Don’t let them on.

Rats can swim, but have a hard time climbing up the steel hull of the ship. So to get onboard, they either need to come up the gang plank or use the mooring lines to gain entry. Well, the POOW has a .45 M1911 that says they ain’t coming up the gang plank. So that leaves the mooring lines.

That big round thing is called a rat guard. On the pier side of the rat guard, the mooring line will be wrapped in plastic and coated with grease. If a rat tries to climb over the guard, it will slip in the grease and go for a swim.

The Tried and True and Easy Peasey Method of keeping Rodentia off of our floating and submerged homes has come down to us from the Age of the Trireen and Sails of the Ancients to Robert Fulton’s Steam Engine to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’s Nuclear Navy and it clearly says that You lie about them being on board in the first place.

But really, the Rat Guard is a Circular contraption made of plastic or wood with a hole drilled into its center the same exact size of a ship or submarines mooring line to allow them to pass though it’s center. Being several inches wider than the mooring lines.

The veracious rats are blocked from walking the lines and denied access to the lower bowels of any vessel. As I said an easy peasey tried and true method of keeping those foul bastards ashore. You just place a big circle of any of the material i mentioned around a mooring line and thats all there is to it. It isn’t 100% but what is?

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