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Status:
"I don't understand. But I don't care, so it works out."
(set 6 days ago)
35,623 posts, read 17,953,728 times
Reputation: 50642
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Quote:
Originally Posted by adjusterjack
Rats will be allowed emotional service animals.
I can tell you, rats are as smart as dogs and make excellent pets. Smart, sweet, social, can exist in a large cage with a couple other rats and you can leave for the weekend, and leave for work, without any worries about them.
I had rats I would take out with me to do gardening, and they'd follow me around the yard and come when called.
This will only last until the rats have seen what happens to their friends. I don't see one whit of difference between this and traditional rat traps, except this looks different. The rats will have this figured out by the end of the business week.
Not really, see my post above.
Bucket/water (or other fluid) rodent traps go back hundreds of years. If done/set up properly they are far more effective than say snap traps, and certainly better than those glue things.
Norway rats have very poor eyesight (as befitting creatures that live mostly underground), so they don't "see" anything happening. They will however follow scent trails laid down by other rats (hence well traveled and marked rat trails), so it really comes down to a "follow the leader" sort of situation.
Live in NYC, and on any given morning you'll find rat "road kill" in middle of road. Yet rats still continue to zoom back and forth across the street nightly. So obviously haven't figured out doing so can be dangerous or even deadly and best avoided.
Status:
"I don't understand. But I don't care, so it works out."
(set 6 days ago)
35,623 posts, read 17,953,728 times
Reputation: 50642
Quote:
Originally Posted by BugsyPal
Not really, see my post above.
Bucket/water (or other fluid) rodent traps go back hundreds of years. If done/set up properly they are far more effective than say snap traps, and certainly better than those glue things.
Norway rats have very poor eyesight (as befitting creatures that live mostly underground), so they don't "see" anything happening. They will however follow scent trails laid down by other rats (hence well traveled and marked rat trails), so it really comes down to a "follow the leader" sort of situation.
Live in NYC, and on any given morning you'll find rat "road kill" in middle of road. Yet rats still continue to zoom back and forth across the street nightly. So obviously haven't figured out doing so can be dangerous or even deadly and best avoided.
Well, yes. Some individuals in any population don't learn.
Just as you see humans trying to cross highways in cities in the wee hours, and they get hit. By and large, humans have learned how to avoid being hit by cars. But not ALL humans.
Just as some rats are just as clueless.
BTW, I watched a street dog in San Antonio navigate the pedestrian crossings, watching for a pedestrian "go" sign before starting out in an intersection crosswalk. We give animals so little credit.
The way to get rid of rats is to get rid of their food supply. No matter how many you catch and kill, the ones left reproduce so rapidly that it will have no effect. On the other hand, if we were to BAN FOOD IN THE SUBWAY, that would be the end of rats in the subway, and the subways would be a whole lot cleaner, too.
More frequent garbage pickups. Rat-proof garbage containers. Heavy fines for those who do not seal their garbage in the rat-proof containers. Inspections and fines for those who leave out garbage for rats to feed on. THAT will greatly decrease the rat population. No food, means no reproduction, means far fewer rats.
BTW, I watched a street dog in San Antonio navigate the pedestrian crossings, watching for a pedestrian "go" sign before starting out in an intersection crosswalk. We give animals so little credit.
I've seen the same thing here with what I call our 'urban deer' & nobody believes me. When the Waldo Canyon Fire burned through national forest & into city limits in 2012, it forced herds of deer, bighorn sheep, packs of coyotes (& bears) into town.
In 2017, while driving through the westside at around 0700, I observed 3 does with 3 fawns waiting patiently on the sidewalk at an intersection. When the crosswalk light changed, the does nudged the fawns off the sidewalk & they all crossed the street together safely & continued to walk down the sidewalk.
It was the craziest thing I'd ever seen but I suppose that after their home had been left blackened & bare, with no green foliage or cover from predators; they had learned to adapt to city life.
Oddly, when we were in NYC in March, on the subways & in Chinatown after dark the night before trash pickup; we never saw not one rat.
I have heard of an apocryphal? method to deal with rats. Basically, catch a whole bunch of them alive. Lock them in an enclosure with no food. After awhile, you will have one large, mean, aggressive rat with a taste for rats. Set him free.
Of course, this probably wouldn't work in a place the size of NYC. Interesting concept though.
City doesn't bother using "traditional traps", first and main response involves poison bait. Problem is that causes all sorts of problems besides not being truly effective for total eradication of rat population.
If you have say a building or grounds you can seal off from new rats entering, poisoned baits *might* give 100% eradication over time. But most good professional exterminators go with a mixture of traps, baits, piled onto cleaning and sealing up an area/building.
New York City's rat problems began exploding when city banned buildings from burning trash (incinerators), and switched (or rather allowed) both commercial and domestic trash to go out in plastic bags instead of metal sealed/rodent proof cans.
New York City (especially Manhattan) has some of the oldest housing stock in the country. Many multi-family buildings were built in early part of last century if not before and thus don't have areas to store large amounts of trash.
When rubbish was incinerated on a daily basis it removed a major food source/attraction for vermin. Now that trash is collected three times a week, but still isn't enough. On off days garbage must sit somewhere on property (again often in plastic bags), which attracts vermin.
Other issue is NYC is going on a near two decade building boom. You start tearing down old buildings (some of them 100 or more years old), digging up streets/ground (the Norway rat is a burrowing creature), and it displaces and disperses rats.
During Prohibition hundreds if not thousands were either killed or left seriously harmed by consumption of methanol or ethanol they either cooked up themselves and or got from bootleggers/questionable sources.
So many were dying that it helped fuel the modern corner profession, which in turn ushered in the era of "corners reports" entered into criminal cases. Previously corners were political hacks with little or no medical experience, and or were simply paid to say what someone wanted them to do. Thus juries didn't often believe a word of their testimony, and as such people literally got away with murder.
There is a great book "The Poisoners Handbook" turned into a PBS program:
Little known story that comes out of Prohibition is that federal government mandated methyl alcohol along with several other contaminants which were poisons to be included in industrial alcohol. This lead to scores if not hundreds of Americans dying from alcohol poisoning.
Industrial alcohols then as now are everywhere. From perfumes to laundry detergents, and so forth. Since obviously then you cannot ban that substance, Congress took other actions knowing fully well that people were illicitly consuming such fluids.
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