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Gosh, joking aside, I'm still a bit scared of what I might find in NYC! It's hard to imagine 17 million people living in a rat/roach infested place, but from what I'm hearing, they do! I grew up in central Florida where we had orange groves nearby and some orange trees in our backyard. We certainly saw a lot of roaches and some rats. And I hated it!
If I moved to NYC, I'd be making ~$60K a year. I would live with roommates, but it looks like I'd still be stuck in an older building. My phobia of rats and roaches may keep me from moving to New York.
I live in a large apartment building built in the 60's that has hundreds of tenents. We are pretty clean and roaches are not an issue during the day. However if you leave the lights off in the kitchen at night and enter at 2am you will see some critters.
Kind of unavoidable, just happy we dont have the big ones...Just make sure to take the trash out at night and try to run the dishwasher so you dont have dirty dishes in there. These two steps help stem the tide of raoches
I saw a video on youtube-ok, it was on youtube because it was funny and likely not entirely the norm- and it was something along the lines of 'why you don't sleep on the NYC subway'. And it showed a gigantic rat-perhaps the honey badger himself- running around and hopping all over a sleeping man and just going where it pleased. No matter how intoxciated I might have gotten during the night prior, I would not be able to stomach something like that running around and jumping on people.
What about just walking down city streets? If I walk down Bleeker St. from place to place, am I going to have to dodge rats? lol
How common are rats?
Stand and look at a subway track for 5 minutes: you will see a rat.
Yup. I see one just about every day whether I'm going to or coming home from work. Though I never saw a really big one. At the 74th and Roosevelt stop, I saw 1 or 2 on the platform because there were at least a dozen trash bags laying around.
I actually see a rat probably one or twice a week (on a subway track or near trash at night). So they're always around, but it's not as if you're dodging herds of them in the city, like wildebeest or something.
Though the other day a rat was on the platform and had somehow gotten hold of a baby's pacifier.
I saw a video on youtube-ok, it was on youtube because it was funny and likely not entirely the norm- and it was something along the lines of 'why you don't sleep on the NYC subway'. And it showed a gigantic rat-perhaps the honey badger himself- running around and hopping all over a sleeping man and just going where it pleased. No matter how intoxciated I might have gotten during the night prior, I would not be able to stomach something like that running around and jumping on people.
What about just walking down city streets? If I walk down Bleeker St. from place to place, am I going to have to dodge rats? lol
If this is the video you're talking about, I and a few other people I know that saw it, think it was staged. That rodent was way too clean to be a subway rat and it wasn't gigantic. It wasn't the typical blackish/gray type either. No one else seemed to have gotten excited over the rat.
That was the video from what I saw, though the one I watched had some funny background music playing. Suffice it to say, if there is any real threat of something like that happening to an NYC subway rider, I may be too big a wuss to live in NYC!
If you live in a decent building, rats shouldn't be a problem. Mice on the other hand, get into most apartments be they new, old, clean, etc.
Here are some tips:
1) Keep your place neat. Dont leave food around and clean your dishes ASAP after dirtying them. This includes not leaving crumbs on the ground. Mice love to eat the crumbs underneath dining room tables, or on the ground of whatever area people are eating in an apartment. When they come to my place they head directly for underneath my daughter's high chair. Just as important: Wipe up water that may splash out and onto the sides of your sinks and tubs. Mice will come for water just as often as food. A lot of people dont realize this.
2) Don't have a lot of clutter or crap piled up everywhere. This includes closets. Make sure your closet is neat and that the floor is visible. If they are not nesting in your apartment they will only come in only periodically to look for food and water. Leaving clutter or piles of stuff everywhere affords them a place live, hide, and breed inside your apartment. They travel through the walls of buildings--this is why they are and can get everywhere. If they are coming to your apartment, you want them leaving afterwards. It sucks but its a lesser evil.
3) Find every pipe (steam, water, etc) that is coming into your apartment no matter how small and fill the space around the pipe with steel wool. This will keep them out for a couple months. Once you spot one again, you know they've chewed their way through or have found another entrance. Mice can squeeze through the tiniest of spaces (they have cartiledge instead of bone, or something).
4) Mice are quick and they travel via routes along walls or via pathways that give them cover. Do not pile stuff up in corners and leave the areas along the walls open. They are scared to travel across wide areas with no cover (ie: across the middle of a room).
5)Best deterrent: Buy a cat, or 2.
Its a constant battle, Id rather try to keep them out or not coming frequently as I hate using traps and having to clean up mouse blood or picking up a glue trap with a screaming mouse stuck to it. With the poison they eat in then run back into the wall or behind your stove then croak and it reeks for a month. Much better to use preemptive methods.
Last edited by adsantos13; 02-03-2012 at 02:34 PM..
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