Winning a rat war is famously difficult. Poison isn’t the definitive move that most people think it is, and it also can result in a vast underground network of tunnels becoming dense with decaying rat corpses. Among the many steps that P. and her husband took, the inarguably cutest one—the only cute one—was driving out to Amish country to pick up a rat terrier, though they returned with not one but two: a sister and a brother, Tillie and Brutus. That was another story going around at the time—that terriers could solve rat problems.