crazy dogs, scary rats

My daughter took a picture yesterday of her dog and Iris, lounging in the yard.  Because it's the best picture I've ever seen of Iris, I cut my daughter's dog out of the picture (sorry, Hawkeye) to get this perfect portrait of mine.  
Iris has issues.  I'm fairly certain she could use a dog psychiatrist, but I can't afford one.  She will obsess on some crazy thing and chase it until she's exhausted.  She still attacks dogs, horses, and people fighting one another on television.  For a while she'd chase after birds in the pasture, but I think she finally realized she'd never catch one; so what was once a full-time job for her has become only an occasional, half-hearted effort.  In the house, she chases after reflections and shadows.  Just pick up a flashlight and she's all attention, because she knows once it's turned on there will be a beam of light she can chase.   
It's dark now on the mornings when I milk the cow.  Normally I would feel my way to the barn, then feel my way to the light switch and turn it on.  Now, though, with gigantic rats lurking in the shadows, I don't want to enter the barn in the dark and run the risk of stepping on a half-dead rat.  So I arm myself with a flashlight, and Iris chases the beam of light all the way to the barn.  
Crazy dog.   I wish she'd learn to chase rats.
Friday evening I tossed bar bait and bait packets in places I knew the rats would lurk.  I bought three different kinds of rat poison; if one didn't work, maybe another one would.  Saturday morning, the bait was gone.  Good!  I placed more bait bars in the same spot.
Sunday morning, those were gone.  I put more bait of a different kind there; when Cliff and I went out to go for our walk, I told him, "Let's go see if they've hauled off the bait again."  
While we were looking at the two hunks of poisoned stuff, one moved!  A rat was on the other side of the hole in the tin trying to pull it through.  
Cliff suggested that they might just be hauling the stuff off and stockpiling it, and perhaps I should quit putting out the bait for awhile.  

 Since then, the bait has stopped disappearing.  I'm hoping that means the rats are in the process of dying and are too weak to come back for more.  There were originally two hunks of bait by this rat hole; the remaining one has been gnawed upon.  I think that's good news.   
The only good rat is a dead rat.