Can a rat do this?

[Annemieke]

I clean house for a man who isn't very clean, to say the least. He has rats and mice appearing in his kitchen, to give you an impression. Just lately things have been disappearing: dishcloths, a whole tea towel vanished from the bottom step of a ladder where I put them to be washed. Without a trace.
Everyone who helps him is suspect now, but I think it's a big rat which takes them away somewhere, for instance behind the washing machine or the cooker.
He says this isn't possible: they would just take bits out, but not disappear a whole tea towel.
Can rats do this?
Thanks!

[doofaloofa]

A rat probably could steal a tea towel, but what's in it for the rat?

[Annemieke]

Drying the dishes?
Actually, I gather, now, that they use it to make a nice warm nest for the winter. I told my boss who was getting paranoid, and is now a lot happier. He doesn't mind the rats, but humans messing around in his kitchen behind his back is something else!

[doofaloofa]

rats!

[diggernotdreamer]

prepper rats

[KathyLauren]

Drying the dishes?
Actually, I gather, now, that they use it to make a nice warm nest for the winter. I told my boss who was getting paranoid, and is now a lot happier. He doesn't mind the rats, but humans messing around in his kitchen behind his back is something else!

Just hope that the rat is not making its nest in the bottom of the clothes dryer.

One of our cats used to bring in live mice to play with. Usually we'd catch them within a day or two and escort them outside. One time we didn't...

We noticed a strange smell coming from the dryer. Since the smell was like something that was hot that shouldn't be, I shut off the dryer, pulled it out from the wall and opened up the back. Mrs. Mouse had made a nice little nest right next to the heating element, with a couple of little baby mice in it, suffering from heatstroke. No sign of Mrs. Mouse at the time (though we caught her later), but the little ones were escorted outside, with prayers (but little optimism) for their well-being. Another few minutes, and the well-being of the house and all its occupants would have been at risk!

It might be prudent to check some of the more hazardous potential nest sites.

[diggernotdreamer]

We had something very strange happen to us. When we were renovating our house, the Wizard took up the floorboards in the bedroom and called me up to see. A mouse had built a nest and in the middle of it was a linisher sanding belt. The Wizards workshop is away from the house and it was his old belt as no-one who ever lived here owned a linisher, so it must have dragged it from the bin in the workshop and somehow got it upstairs and under the floorboards, possible via a hole in the stone walls of the house, it was unbelievable, had visions of the mice from Bagpuss going heave heave in their squeaky mouse voices

[Skippy]

Almost ashamed to say that we had a rat in the house last year .We think it got in via a hole in the wall where a pipe had been removed or probably more likely just walked in through the open door and became trapped when we shut the door. It soon became obvious that we had a rat , droppings and chewed up material , it even chewed some conkers that had been placed to deter the spiders ( different subject but that seemed to work) . We didn't experience any tea towels going for a walk but it did drag some potatoes from the kitchen , across the hallway , into another room to hide them behind a piano we had at the time. As we had a foster baby at the time my wife took no chances and called in pest control who put down bait traps. We never caught the actual animal but a few days later my wife heard scratching from the chimney breast which she recorded for the pest control guy. As in the mean time I had filled up a hole in the kitchen we seemed to reckon that it had entered the hole trying to get out and became lost in the cavity.
On a similar vein a customer of mine was experiencing a mouse problem. I leant her a trap , a humane trapdoor type which she put to good use catching a mouse a day for thirteen days. Personally I think she wasn't releasing them far enough away and was catching the same mouse over and over again.