Rats bring out the caveman in the modern dad

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) - Family life offers few opportunities for the modern dad to feel truly manly. We drive minivans, read bedtime stories, stock college funds.

We are rarely called upon to protect our homes from wild intruders.

All of which explains the weirdly intense satisfaction I got from a battle last week with a giant, acrobatic, possibly bionic roof rat.

By the time it was done I'd gone from sensitive househusband to cold- blooded cave-dad.

We'd had trouble with vermin before. One night a year ago, a rat sauntered into our living room, rose up on its hind legs and rubbed its hands together like a cartoon villain. Leaping up with a girlish yelp, I sent the rat scurrying into the basement.

I fought back the only way I knew how: I went online.

Predictably, this only added to my sense of panic. Real rats, I learned, are nothing like the witty gourmets in my kids' favorite Pixar movie. They leave toxic droppings in pantries, gnaw through wood and wire and have even been known to bite children who leave crumbs in their beds. And they carry disease: typhus, rabies, bubonic plague.

I am not a particularly aggressive guy. I've been in two fights my entire life, both of them lopsided beatings at summer camp - the first inspired me to write a heartfelt poem on the futility of violence, the second came after my hippy counselors urged me to read that poem at campfire.

Ever since, I've been averse to the use of force of any kind, with any creature. I am just as likely to chauffeur a spider out the front door than squash it with a rolled-up newspaper.