My teenage years were spent in Australia in a house that was at the time about an hour's drive into the bush outside Brisbane. We lived in a small housing development surrounded by farmland, almost exclusively grazing land for cattle and pigs with some sugar cane thrown in for relief. Our housing development was the first hint of suburbia on farmland that was itself carved from the bush less than a century before. (See Mary Howells' A Brief History of Logan if you're curious.)
A couple of minutes walk from our house found us at Norm's pig farm. Norm's farm was an amazing place for a kid. Norm's house was a ramshackle old Queensland farmhouse festooned with paper Christmas decorations covered with a thick coat of dust and cobwebs from the Christmas that Norm's wife died in a car wreck. Norm's parents had homesteaded the place in the late1800s. His barn was their original house, constructed from rough-hewn slabs of the native timber.
All in all, Norm's farm could be described as junk, dirt, dust and life - the junk of a marriage turned to years of bachelorhood, the dirt and dust of a hardscrabble life tinged with sadness, and life in the form of pigs and cows. These were free-range pigs weighing upwards of 300 pounds who roamed over a couple of hundred acres of farm leading down to the river, huge pigs, monstrous pigs with beady little eyes glinting with a malicious intelligence, pigs with attitudes.
Unfortunately Norm's laissez-faire lifestyle meant rats, hundreds of them. Every few months the rat population would build up to where we'd start to see them around the houses. My father and I would grab our trusty .22 caliber rifle and go rat hunting, with Norm's permission and encouragement.
At first we used regular high-velocity ammo, but I remember the day when I shot a rat from the doorway of a shed only to have the bullet (which passed through the rat in a most satisfactory manner) come zinging back past my ear after ricocheting off a metal bracket. A few moment later my eyes adjusted to the darkness in the shed enough to realize that the bracket was attached to the kerosene tank used to fuel the old tractor. One inch further to the left or right and I would have missed the bracket and BOOM! So after that we used hollow-point bullets which flattened out inside the rat and transformed said rat into a soggy bag full of liquified rat parts, and if they exited at all they did so with much less force.
After we shot a couple hundred rats, whose bodies we either threw into the perpetual wood fire burning under a big urn of pig-slops or into the pig-slop urn itself, depending on how full it was, the remaining rats would keep to the farm for a couple of months until the next population explosion. In the meantime back in the housing development we kept our yards clean and tidy so that the rats would find neither food nor a convenient nesting hole, we kept dogs who made it clear that stray rats were not welcome except as a doggie hors doeuvre , and we made a regular foray to Norm's with the .22 a couple of times a year.
If we use the rats as a metaphor for MS, then the analogy for keeping our yard clean and tidy is keeping our bodies fit and healthy, meaning that we should eat right and exercise properly. That makes sense, because any little cold or fever can make our daily MS symptoms so much worse. The analogy to keeping dogs that keep the encroachment of rats to a minimum is taking the disease-modifying drugs that our doctors prescribe for us to keep the encroachment of new symptoms to a minimum. The analogy to the regular forays to Norm's is taking regular forays to a neurologist.
I don't recommend taking a .22 though.
Postscript: It's all gone now. Norm had surgery to remove a tumor in his neck, and he died a matter of days later. His kids sold the farm to some developers. It's all streets and houses. I'm not even sure if the old farmhouse and barn are still there. They were probably bulldozed to make way for new houses. On Google Earth there's no sign that the farm ever existed. I wonder if the new residents ever hear the squeal of ghost piglets and the furtive scurrying of little pink rat feet in the night. Sigh.