I'm blogging this because I think it's absurd that the city and the NYT imagine this is some brilliant new "high-tech" machine. We're told that Mayor-elect Eric Adams has declared the traps "amazing."
There's nothing new about the idea of drowning small animals.... whatever the "proprietary' formula" might be. And you've got rats running in and out of the thing for "a week or so" before you do anything but feed them. Maybe the NYT is laughing at Webster, but this is about tormenting living creatures, so think about how you'd feel suddenly — at your favorite restaurant — dumped into some "proprietary" liquid.
Credit to the NYT for getting me to click by using the word "Oreo." I became irascibly skeptical when I saw that the drowning machines didn't use Oreos at all but peanut butter Oreos.
The comments over there are all about feral cats! There's your better rattrap, they're all saying.
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A variation on this high tech trap is a 5 gallon bucket 3/4 filled with water, with a rope or ramp up the outside and a thimble mounted on the wire handle, which is fixed over the bucket. Bacon or peanut butter or other bait wrapped around the freely rotating thimble attracts the rats, who cannot hold onto the rotating thimble and drop into the water below to drown. This rat trap technique has been around - probably - since one day after the introduction of 5 gallon buckets.
As a child of the South who once had to use a flat nosed shovel to remove poisoned rat carcasses from my dad's furniture store basement - after they had liquified in the summer heat and could be found behind the stored, boxed furniture - I approve of any rat elimination method that puts the corpses in a readily removable container.
Feral cats? The eat mice. Rats eat them.
It will upgrade my opinion of the liberals of NYC and similar environs if they are actually willing to kill rats for public safety. After all, they are unwilling to take criminals off the streets for public safety.
"this is about tormenting living creatures, so think about how you'd feel suddenly — at your favorite restaurant — dumped into some "proprietary" liquid."
Actually, I feel exactly what they feel about me. Following the basic norm of reciprocity.
But I also believe in evolution, so I am sure the rats of NYC will adapt. Let's see if they are up to it.
Imagine a rat imagining a better human trap.
Peanut butter is my go-to for mouse traps. So much more humane to snap their mousey little necks. Except for the ones who get an arm or leg trapped, and then they flail around dragging the trap to whatever hole they came in from but can't get out because mousetrap. How would I feel if I were tricked and doused by rodent overlords? Wouldnt happen. They'd devise some other more horrible fate. So no sympathy for the oreo-eating NYC drowned rats.
It depends on whether or not de Blasio likes Oreo cookies.
Just do this but fill the bottom with CO2. I suspect dry ice is cheaper than Oreos. Also, the rat corpse can then be used to feed other animals. But I must admit, there seems much more grift in the NYC solution.
What, exactly, are the humane ways to trap and exterminate rats?
"The comments over there are all about feral cats! There's your better rattrap, they're all saying."
Never mind the millions of birds killed by feral and pet cats let outside.
Cats are literally an invasive species at that point.
Althouse said..
>Maybe the NYT is laughing at Webster, but this is about tormenting living creatures, <
That's it, for sure. We can just see these business proprietors, setting aside for the moment their hopes of maintaining sanitary premises, sitting around saying amongst themselves, "Hey, let's torment some living creatures for the next month. It'll cost $250 a week but think of the fun!"
>so think about how you'd feel suddenly — at your favorite restaurant — dumped into some "proprietary" liquid.<
As opposed to being decapitated by a spring-loaded device while I'm munching my cheese? Or being torn apart and eaten alive by feral cats? Well, since you asked, I think I'd feel pretty good about opting for drowning while drunk.
Rats are decease carrying pests who must be gotten rid of. If you don't at least try to deal with them you'll find yourself in the kind of health crisis not seen since the middle ages. So I have little sympathy for our rodent friends.
That said, this contraption looks like it is a lot more complicated than it has to be. Perhaps they are trying to make it seem more humane because it doesn't kill the rats instantly, but to the rats it makes no difference. Drowning them is (as our hostess suggests) just as cruel.
The real issue here is how the city ended up with such a rat problem that spending money on fancy rat killing machines became an option. It seems to me that they let the problem fester as long as there were no political consequences. Now that it is out of control and can't be hidden, they are interested in solving it. I don't think these machines will make up for the years of neglect. Our rodent friends are better at surviving than even city politicians.
as per usual, private enterprise does it Cheaper, Better
Mouse Trap Bucket - Flip and Slide Bucket Lid Mouse Trap |Humane or Lethal| |Trap Door Style
Watch the video! Be Shocked, and Amazed!! DEATH TO MICE!!
Can this be scaled up to deal with looters? …Give them a week to conduct their usual smash-and-grab for trinkets, then start dropping them into an acid bath.
I read that headline and thought it was about a nouveau cuisine fad. Casa La Femme was clearly some sort of ridiculously overpriced NY tasting menu joint, and they'd just contracted a gastro-gimmick engineer to install some kind of peanut butter Oreo-dispensing gastro-gimmick in the foyer of their restaurant as part of their grand opening shenanigans.
The comments over there are all about feral cats! There's your better rattrap, they're all saying
Daffy Duck in Dime to Retire
Plot summary: It initially starts with Daffy sending a mouse to Porky's room via a pneumatic tube; the mouse eats a stick of celery loudly thereby disrupting Porky's sleep. Porky calls for its removal, the extermination of which by cat has a $5 pussy cat fee. The cat, which refuses to leave the bed, is then eliminated by a boxer dog for a fee of $10, which repeatedly box-punches Porky after Daffy sounds a hidden boxing bell for room #16. The dog is then evicted by a $26 lion, which tries to eat Porky; the lion is eradicated by an elephant for a $72 fee; the elephant engulfs the whole room and is exterminated (driven off) by the celery-eating mouse for a $666 fee, thereby wrecking Porky's room in the elephant's panic and causing the whole loop to repeat.
Our neighbors cat looked feral. Midtone gray, psycho, etc. He lived on my lawn in the sun. He would bring me rats about once every week or two to the steps of the outbuilding/office.
After they moved, I had to start trapping the fuckers. It's a bloody business. Wear surgical gloves when setting the trap. Use the black plastic claw traps. Avocado.
I grew up in Alberta, Canada, where there are officially no rats. If one comes in on a truck or something, it is supposed to be ... er, disposed of. If a pair manage to start reproducing, it may be more difficult to get all of them, but apparently it can be done.
Two years ago we moved from one southern Ontario community to another. Once in the old place we had rats on our back porch, clawing at the glass door, acting crazy. I was a bit scared,and this may have been the only time in my life I had seen a wild rat, or perhaps any kind of living one. I phoned some authorities, and they said nearby construction had probably disturbed the rats out of their underground tunnels.
As we were settling in our new place (new condo, and most of our place is not on the ground floor), we heard stories about rats in this area. One about an older somewhat neglected house where the rats had taken over. Another about a newish well-maintained house in which a group of rats had installed themselves behind the drywall in one basement room. The extermination took some time. As the linked story here implies, rats are smart and/or creatures of habit. They won't simply fall for a new trap. So: leave food outside the house to lure them there. From there move to traps of some kind. You will kill an impressive number, confirming that there were more than you thought in your basement. Open up drywall in basement, expose nest, etc., hoping there are no more living rats in there. The woman who owned the place said she then re-did all the drywall in the whole basement, and did some other reno as well. (Where are the holes? How can we plug them all?)
I've done some reading, and my conclusion now is that hundreds of thousands of rats live underground, mostly in the country somewhere. The wonder is not that they sometimes come into our houses, but that they do this so rarely. Do they find our houses too dry, when underground tunnels will sort of "sweat" moisture? Apparently if they do get inside, they like to chew PVC or plastic pipe.
Here's my idea about rats in NYC: I won't live in a place infested with vermin. Enjoy your rats, Gothamites. (MadisonDog is part rat terrier...hasn't nosed out a rat yet)
Rats love peanut butter. I think it is commonly used as bait by pest control people when they are trying to control rodents. I have seen it so used, anyway. Using Oreos seems like any unneeded elaboration.
“…think about how you'd feel suddenly — at your favorite restaurant — dumped into some "proprietary" liquid”. I can’t say I like the idea. But I also wouldn’t like having my favorite restaurant rot out my innards with some corrosive poison, or suddenly break my neck with a spring driven metal bar. Being eaten by feral cats isn’t all that appealing either. I imagine the inventor of the common spring driven rodent trap hoped it would be a humane way to kill rats and mice by instantly breaking their necks. Much of the time such traps do work that way, but sometimes the animal just has it’s back broken, causing a long, painful death. In judging how humane this particular device is, what matters most is how quickly the “proprietary liquid” causes the rat to lose conciseness. If almost immediately, it’s likely more humane than most other methods of rodent control. It if take a long time, or does not work at all, than probably not. I don’t know how well this actually works. To me, the quotes about it read like marketing boilerplate.
but this is about tormenting living creatures,
How sick and ghoulish do you need to be to have more concern for rats than you do human babies?
Rats must not be harmed, but it's perfectly ok to dismember babies and suck their brains from their skulls.
The home made version of this is getting a five gallon plastic bucket from Home Depot or Lowes, filling it half-way up with water, throwing some bird seed on top of the water, and placing a plank so that the rats can reach the top of the bucket.
This video is a no-kill variation of that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ze7Fjjuses
Personally, I like the fact that we have some outdoor cats around, helps with the tomato harvest.
The comments over there are all about feral cats! There's your better rattrap, they're all saying.
Next year, when NYC is overrun by feral cats, they can unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the feral cats.
And when NYC is overrun by needle snakes, they've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. And when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Well, it's true enough, about the feral cats I mean. Though I hear that the rats in NY sewers are enormous. (Stephen King's "Graveyard Shift," come to life.)
"... so think about how you'd feel suddenly — at your favorite restaurant — dumped into some "proprietary" liquid."
Didn't WaPoo already tell us the answer to this question? Blogged here yesterday at 6:23 a.m. Soon enough you wouldn't feel anything. So what's the problem?
Maybe it would be more humane if the trap sucked the rats out with a vacuum and dismembered them. Or perhaps using feral cats is the ultimate humane solution, as suggested in the comments. Someone alert planned parenthood.
Don't tell any of these geniuses that rats aren't humans but human fetuses are.
I did not know that politicians liked peanut butter Oreos.
I bet feral cats prefer birds and the garbage they share with rats. Read NYC rats had a problem with the sharp decrease in restaurant garbage during the pandemic.
I've been watching Shawn Woods YouTube channel recently. He tests out traps for various pests. One thing I have learned is that catching mice is relatively easy but catching rats is hard. Rats are much smarter than mice and much more suspicious of new things. A trap that can catch dozens of mice a night may not work on rats at all. (To provide some intelligence comparison, in one video a mouse voluntarily jumped into a bucket trap for no apparent reason. In another a rat managed to easily escape a trap that had caught many mice already.) So the "high-tech" modifier may be questionable, but an effective rat trap is impressive.
As to drowning them, I am not sure what you are expecting here. Rats are dangerous and destructive creatures, they carry all sorts of parasites and diseases, they reproduce quickly, and most of them are non-native. It is not like you can adopt them out, and you cannot release them back into the wild. The point is to kill them. Drowning is effective and limits the opportunity of escape after capture; it is about as humane as it can be while still being effective. The alternative is to capture them alive and then kill them, which I am not sure is any better. I mean when you have decided that the solution is death, it is going to be a messy business regardless.
Here in NH, it's chipmunks, which get out of control even faster than squirrels, and that's saying a lot. Squirrels are just rats with pretty tails, or "a rat in a prom dress" as a friend used to say. I used to be a gentle soul, but really, just put out a bucket of water they can't climb out of an put bait that causes them to fall in.
I blame Disney and a lot of children's literature for teaching children that Billy Bass has a rich, rewarding home life, and for anthropomorphising dozens of creatures which are just mindless eating machines. Our very recent ancestors knew better, that none of them are cute and they will steal or render inedible the baby's dinners for the winter.
There's a special Christmas Aldi's store brand Oreo with tiny bits of peppermint candy in the filling for great mouth feel. I've eaten 3 packages in the last month, with one left, but they were sold out on Tuesday. Last week, a woman bought 5 packages--and nothing else.
"The Prestige"
Watch it if you haven't...watch it again if you have.
Great sport to night hunt rats with peanut butter, high powered air gun and a night scope. Urban or barn fun.otsa' You Tube videos on the subject.
“ . Drowning is effective and limits the opportunity of escape after capture; it is about as humane as it can be while still being effective. The alternative is to capture them alive and then kill them, which I am not sure is any better. I mean when you have decided that the solution is death, it is going to be a messy business regardless.”
There’s also poison.
I’m in favor of killing them, just disapproving of laughing at their suffering.
Feral cats won't kill large rats. A large one pound Norway rat can and will kill an eight to ten pound cat. Cats might kill smaller young rats and mice, but most likely they'll do what they do everywhere else, become an endemic invasive species and destroy less personally threatening native wildlife.
Feral cats won't kill large rats. A large one pound Norway rat can and will kill an eight to ten pound cat. Cats might kill smaller young rats and mice, but most likely they'll do what they do everywhere else, become an endemic invasive species and destroy less personally threatening native wildlife.
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