[During the pandemic, r]ats that would typically stick close to their food sources began taking more risks, like making brazen midday dashes to piles of trash bags and other potential meals and hangouts. But recently, as human behavior has returned to something approaching normalcy, the rats haven’t reverted to their old habits; they’ve simply expanded their tactic...
And then there's the "proliferation of... soy-based insulation for car wiring — basically catnip for rodents."
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yet ANOTHER reason, not to live in a slime pit like NYC... Right Robert Cook?
Urban Island Effect.
chicken bones
Santeria?
Maybe they should bring in a whole bunch of stray cats to catch the rats.
Then a whole bunch of pitbulls to catch the cats.
I don't know what's next, but the smart people have already moved out.
"It's like deja vu, all over again."
You got rats on the West Side
Bed bugs uptown
What a mess this town's in tatters, I've been shattered
My brain's been battered, splattered all over Manhattan
There are all kinds of news reports about animals eating soy-based plastics and insulation. I wonder if junkyards will start stripping it out and selling it as food. Pet food? Pasta? Soylent Green?
There are ultrasonic rat-repellers you can put under the hood. 30 to 70 bucks. Gonna be buying one soon. Rats also like chewing the windshield/water tank to wash down that tasty engine insulation. Fuckers.
The dissolution of our Democrat-dominated cities is Biblical in its thoroughness. Chicken bones are trivial compared to the coming brimstone.
The New York Times playing the part of Lot against the cities of the plain is unexpected. Nevertheless, I foresee a rather salty future for the Grey Lady.
Here's a solution!
"...my mechanic popped the hood and found chicken bones, some bread and part of a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich sitting there."
So how many Michelin stars did it get?
Wow...I thought rats and mice in cars was just a rural parked car issue. Think pack rats in rural US. but it makes sense that the country mouse has a different life from the city mouse. Rodents love to stow away on board boats so why not cars too!?
Alas, my only complaint is that the article linked was again behind a paywall. I simply refuse to pay for media opinions, esp NYT.
I remember that old New Yorker cartoonist George Booth, the one who continually put Bull Terriers in his cartoons - there was one of a mechanic, with his helper hulking in the background devouring a sandwich, telling a client that they "finally found the problem - there's a deviled egg in your carburetor."
I have a friend that lives in South Texas, drives a Mercedes. He had to replace his entire wiring harness, because Mercedes has made the Stunning and Brave decision to use soy-based wiring insulation, in their quest to somehow become Green and Save the Planet (for rats). The mice and rats went right through it. So the good news is, he has a new wiring harness. The bad news is, his only parts option was to use Mercedes OEM parts, meaning it's soy-based insulation.
"proliferation of... soy-based insulation for car wiring — basically catnip for rodents."
Soy based insulation is a serious problem. We have to encase wiring in a metal sheath outdoors in SE NM. I know of vehicles that have been seriously damaged.
".. soy-based insulation for car wiring."
Yep, google that and find class action suits. But, soy-based insulation for car wiring is better for the environment than icky petroleum based, so it's worth the aggravation and expense.
P.S., squirrels love it as well.
The wiring in our neighbors all-electric vehicle was chewed up by rats. Apparantly the soy was too sweet to resist.
Nobody opens their own hood anymore?
I swear you’ve blogged about this article before, maybe it’s just my imagination.
This is nothing new, except possibly in an urban environment. If your community is more rural, suburban even, mice, squirrels, and cats have been using vehicles for habitation. It's not terribly unusual to find critter food and nesting materials under a car hood. Somewhat less common to find that said critters have been feasting on the electrical wiring. They find the insulation tasty. With the growing use of plastics even fuel and vapor lines are targeted as well.
Where I live in the desert SW, I am at war with packrats. They have caused several hundreds of dollars in damage, and one vehicle caught fire from a short caused by packrats eating wiring. I checked the car's engine compartment every other day...and it wasn't enough. I now keep the hood open on my RV, and I have strobe lights in the compartment and lights shining underneath. I do the same with a truck that I have to keep parked outside. This has worked so far. I also destroy and nests I find, and I have small strobe lights in and around a woodpile. So far it has worked. Packrats are smart, adorable and relentless. I have video of a packrat jumping over the trip in a double door humane trap. (I drown the poor little guys when they are caught.) I use several different types of traps because they figure them out if you use the same ones all the time. I don't use poison because I don't want to kill the hawks that might prey on them and I don't want the little SOB's dying in my walls. I had a stray cat hanging out on the RV port before I found the lights. He/she did a good job until the bobcat's came and introduced it to the flip side of the circle of life.
I live in the northern Virginia suburbs, and squirrels recently disabled my wife's vehicle by chewing up soy-based elements of the fuel line. The mechanic told us that he put a dryer sheet in his own engine to keep them out, but it made his car smell horribly like Downy for the longest time.
Santeria?
It's an offshoot called Breakfast Santeria. Instead of dancing and drumming at night, practitioners prefer to simply meet for coffee before work.
The offerings found under the hood may have been an attempt to call down an oricha to make the check engine light go off.
Soy-based insulation? Depriving the rats of real animal protein? Is that animal cruelty?
Anyone who has done any electrical wiring in an outbuilding of any sort learns very quickly to us either solid or flexible metal conduit or risk shorts, fires, whatever, due to rodents. It will be a time to worry when rats start eating through steel...
Soy-based wiring insulation is the main reason I'll never buy a Kubota tractor. Too many colleagues have had $1500 bills to replace rodent-candy wiring harnesses. Except for that, Kubota tractors are great, but replacing wiring harnesses is not the expensive part -- missing key field-work windows on acccount of the damage can easily cost 10x as much.
Check Engine??
That car has to be at least 20 years old.
@Inga -- It's not your imagination. She posted the same article in August 2022.
I know I
I don't know about rats, but in E Tennessee, I had a run in with a chipmunk who cost us $2k in car repairs when he ate through a bunch of wiring that had insulation made of soy.
There was an article on Boston.com today about Brookline, Massachusetts, (a very toney suburb of Boston,) about a citizen signed bill to use COVID funds for rat problems there.
Who thought making car parts out of food was a good idea?
And Inga is correct- Althouse posted this last Summer with the exact same title- the quote from the story.
Weird. It was on the front page of the NYT today, like a new article. Sorry. I would not have blogged it if I’d noticed the date.
Thanks for remembering. Funny that I pulled the same quote.
"The ‘check engine’ light came on, and I brought it to my mechanic, who popped the hood and found chicken bones, some bread and part of a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich sitting there."
This is normal when you've just come from the voodoo mechanic shop down the street.
There will also be chicken blood in the oil.
What kind of idiot never even opens the hood of their car before going to see the mechanic?
"Weird. It was on the front page of the NYT today, like a new article."
Maybe the Times is pissed that their mayor hasn't done anything about the rat problem. I was going to suggest he find a pied piper to lure all the rats to a red state as payback for the illegal immigrants bussed to NY.
But I see one definition of pied piper is "One, such as a leader, who makes irresponsible promises". So maybe he doesn't want to be associated with that term.
A few years ago I had a car that started running on 5 cylinders.
The mechanic told me to stop parking it outside—squirrels had eaten through a spark plug wire.
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