They were "pet rats" in the sense that they were the type of rats — domestic rats, "fancy rats" — that are bred to serve as pets, but these rats were no one's pets. They were just running around "in a now-condemned house in the New York City suburbs."
“They’re in the walls; they’re in the cabinets; they’re in the drawers; they’re in the couch,” Floridia said. “They were basically everywhere.”Once captured, the rats are separated by gender to prevent further breeding. Females can give birth to eight to 18 pups every three to four weeks.
Separated by gender?! Who cares about gender, here? The problem is the rats are breeding like mad. It's a matter of hard-core sex.
We're told that it's hard to get people to adopt rats. First of all, people hate rats, but the hatred isn't justified against the fancy rat. We're told this type of rat is "usually smaller, more tame, more social and easier to handle" than those rats people loathe. Second, "they must be adopted in pairs or more, as they are social animals." You might think that you can be a lone rat's dear friend, but "Humans cannot mimic the kind of social interaction they need from another rat."
Ha ha. You might have thought human-style friendship would satisfy the rat, but you would need to "mimic" a rat, and the rat experts already know you will fail at that. That seems fair. I, a non-expert, would say that you are huge, you are unpleasantly hairless, and you are not tame, social, and easy to handle. What does a rat want with you? You should adopt a rat, because the rat is "social," but then your sociability toward the rat is not even the right kind. The rat needs another rat. And these rats were used to 449 other rats.
But these rats will be adopted. They've got a whole long article in The Washington Post about their need. And WaPo tells us "The rat rescue community is by far the kindest." That's quoting Erica Kutzing, vice president and co-founder of Strong Island Animal Rescue League, who has kindly ideas about that kindness:
But these rats will be adopted. They've got a whole long article in The Washington Post about their need. And WaPo tells us "The rat rescue community is by far the kindest." That's quoting Erica Kutzing, vice president and co-founder of Strong Island Animal Rescue League, who has kindly ideas about that kindness:
"I think it is attributed to the fact that rats are the underdogs, and they can almost be a representation of the forgotten people; the people who don’t always fit in. People resonate with rats because they are kind of seen as an outcast.... We are not going to stop until we find placement for everyone. We don’t have any other choice."
Rats are the underdogs, but they probably do make a pretty good pet, perhaps better than the underdog dogs kindly people adopt as rescue pets. And yet, I think you'll look better to other people if you express your overflowing kindness toward a dog. You, with a rat... it will be more...
With a friend to call my own, I'll never be alone, and you my friend will see, you've got a friend in me....
Mga Post
75 komento:
weaponized empathy, rodent edition.
I prompted Grok, "Glover is always creepy in a comically pathetic way. What's up with him?"
Answer: "He's openly proud of being highly unconventional, with a unique worldview shaped by his artistic background (his dad is actor Bruce Glover, and he grew up around showbiz). Glover has described himself as eccentric but not messed up, and he's given bizarre interviews (like his infamous 1987 David Letterman appearance where he almost kicked Dave) that fuel the "weird guy" reputation. He directs his own avant-garde films (like the disturbing What Is It? and It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine), writes books, records music, and owns a restored 400-year-old estate in the Czech Republic. Many see his intensity as genuine artistic commitment rather than instability—he's just fully committed to his oddball persona."
A welcome diversion from the onslaught of toxic social media ranting, cursing and denunciation coming later today, Althouse. Wish Scott Adams was still around to parse the controversy. He had a pet rat: Ratbert.
The rat in "Ben"/"Willard" is obviously not a "fancy" rat. But if you really cared about the underdog wouldn't you take in the more hated type of rat? That's what people do with rescue dogs, embrace the pit bull mix and other dogs that mean people hate.
What does the Venn diagram look like with rat adopters and Leftist ideology in general?
I meant people who hold Leftist ideology in general ...
AA has a long and storied history of dwelling on rats.
Where your nightmares end, Willard begins.
The movies, "Ben" and "Willard", from the 1970's, were super-creepy, and not in a comically pathetic way.
Market fancy rats as the ideal pet of the future. When we are living in Martian dome colonies, or lava tubes on the Moon, a fancy rat would handle low gravity much better than than those dogs and cats that are always jumping around.
Even on Earth, when we own nothing, and are happy, a rat would be more inclined to eat insect protein and be comfortable sharing a sleeping pod with us.
We are not going to stop until we find placement for everyone.
Well, the cute rats. The rats we’ve told ourselves are pets, even if without an owner, because apparently an owner isn’t necessary to be a pet.
The other rats can go die for all we care.
A pair of rats can be good pets. They're smart and clean. They have their own personalities and can be affectionate. The biggest problem with them is that they only live a couple of years.
I say deport them all back to Norway. They have illegally invaded us.
"What have I misplaced now?!?"
"There's some empathy in this drawer that has a skillion rats, too."
"Ha, there it is..."
"That smells delicious!" - John Spartan
Michael Jackson, not Crispin Glover.
Didn't you make your name in the blogging business because of your great knowledge of cultural trivia?
The movie King Rat (1965) comes to mind. POW Corporal King starts a cottage industry in the prison camp breeding rats and selling the meat as a rare delicacy. Think of the possibilities here. Talking to you SNAP recipients.
I'm guessing the Rescue League keeps a sharp eye out for adoption applicants who've also formed a human-style friendship with a snake.
Fancy rats will become feral rats within about twenty or thirty generations of uncontrolled breeding. They may resemble a "fancy" rat in coloration or coat pattern, but the behavior will be totally reverted to the mean.
The same thing happens to dogs. We seldom see truly feral dogs in the West, but they're common in some parts of south Asia. Known as pariahs, they look like mongrel dogs, but their behavior is more typically lupine rather than canine. One can catch an adult feral dog, but being caught won't make it revert to the typically human-centered behavior patterns of its ancestors.
Lyudmila Trut documented a similar pattern in domesticated sliver foxes, the main difference being the number of generations of uncontrolled breeding until the domesticated strain reverted to wild-type behavior. After about five generations the kits became as fearful and defensive as wild foxes even though some physical traits such as curly tails and blaze markings persisted. Pariah dogs have existed in India for longer than records have been kept, so a fifth-generation feral might be recoverable. The key here is the 90,000 generations of the dog-human relationship has engendered a very deep genetic imprint fancy rats lack.
Yesterday or so, apropos of something or other (oh wait, it was the cold!), I commented that I doubted that NYC dwellers were as good friends with their neighbors as tv and movies would have us believe. I'm not a big-city person, but in my limited experience living in and knowing people who live in big cities, people don't seem to know who lives in the unit two doors down, for instance. This rat-adoption thing would tend to reinforce my belief, I think.
That said, keeping rats as pets would be a lot less expensive and inconvenient than the COVID mutt we have - much as I love her.
Rats. Once you clean them there's not much meat on them.
Quaestor: "Lyudmila Trut documented a similar pattern in domesticated sliver foxes"
As a domesticated silver fox myself, I would say we can go wild in the current generation. CC, JSM
Also, 20 comments in and no one made the obvious joke that the headline looks like another ICE related post?? CC, JSM
My threshold for reading the WaPo is pretty high, and this does not even come close....so I'm just going to assume that a house teeming with cute rats started out with roughly...two. And given the moderate probability that somebody will start liking the two they get from RattyRescue and get just one more..... This assumes btw that the initial pair were either surgically "fixed", which seems implausible, or sex sorted. Ask anyone who has domestic chickens how often they start hearing unwelcome crowing at dawn about a month after you buy those allegedly all girl chicks....
There aren't many men on the roster of the Strong Island Animal Rescue League. Animal rescue is a mostly feminine avocation. I've had dealings with rescuers. They tend to be obsessive and more than slightly nuts.
Rats in a colony, and they wonder why they had a cholera epidemic in la
Quaestor: "Animal rescue is a mostly feminine avocation. I've had dealings with rescuers. They tend to be obsessive and more than slightly nuts."
Now there's a parallel with illegal immigration....ICE are dealing with a lot of obsessive rescuers....CC, JSM
I can tell you stories, like the two-bedroom guest house turned over to a "cat rescue" clique. Even stripping the sheetrock and the flooring didn't cure the eye-burning stench after the rescuers found other diversions for their raging maternal drives. And there's the woman who disappeared from Sarah Lawrence and re-emerged years later living in a ramshackle 19th-century manor house in the North Carolina Blue Ridge mountains with about thirty dogs, myriad felines, and 700 zebra finches.
To be clear: They are able to define "woman" when it comes to the rats.
Animal hoarders are not animal rescuers.
Talk about a good intention gone bad.
Pretti's father is Jewish.
Ann is angry they're separating rats by gender.
Good German, daddy's grrul, u r.
Send them to work for Mamdami.
Are you doing a jewish metaphor thing here?
Prone or suppine? Meadehouse has lost the plot.
God protect jon and chrissy and the evil that has overtaken their father's house. Thou shalt worship no false gods.
Only in a society as pampered, indulged and cossetted as the readership of the WaPo would "rescuing" rats be considered praiseworthy. I suspect they fall in the same category as those who think aborting human babies is also praiseworthy. Or be completely congruent on the Venn diagram that kamala would happily provide.
No rat drawings?? I liked those.
those allegedly all girl chicks
I think it was a Gladwell book - did he write Thinking Fast and Slow? It might've been that one - where there was a discussion of how to determine the sex of chicks. It turned out that the best, really the only effective, way was to pair new chick-sexers with veterans, and just have them guess. The veterans would tell them yes or no after their guesses, and in time the novices would become as accurate as the veterans (um ... however accurate that is - based on the comment I quote from, maybe even the best aren't that good!), with neither the veterans nor the novices knowing exactly what they were basing their judgments on.
people are stupid
No, Willard! Willard, no!
"That said, keeping rats as pets would be a lot less expensive and inconvenient than the COVID mutt we have - much as I love her."
The problem is a few rats tend to become a plague of rats rather quickly. A rat doesn't eat expensive food, nor does a rat require much space. A rat. However, a rat is an unhappy rat. Those drives need an outlet, specifically another rat of the opposite sex.
Vet care will be costly in any case. Whether horse, dog, cat, or rat, neutering is surgery, which ain't cheap. I'd venture an educated guess that the "now-condemned house" was once occupied by someone who thought keeping rats would be cheaper than keeping a dog or two.
The humane thing to do is give them to the zoo, which will have no problem disposing of them properly, and which would make a lot of the denizens kept their quite happy for a short while.
I adopt lots of rats. I just don't tell the shelters that my real pets are three 8-ft boas and a 6-ft python. /sarc
I'd venture an educated guess that the "now-condemned house" was once occupied by someone who thought keeping rats would be cheaper than keeping a dog or two.
A valuable point! We once tried to save my little daughter's (dehydrated, because it couldn't quite reach the water bottle - which of course we didn't realize) juvenile gerbil by taking it to the vet - the visit cost $60 and the gerbil died anyway.
And what do you do if, say, you're cleaning your rat habitat and the rats escape from the container you're holding them in and you can't recapture them? Call an exterminator to kill your child's pets so they don't accidentally cause your house to become overrun and condemned? Thank you, I'll stick with my dog.
I know people who would "adopt" rats for free.
Usually they have to buy them.
Yeah, I was wondering if they'd let snake owners get in on the adoption action.
The rat infested house must have been filthy and so must've the rats. Somebody had to give each and every one these rats a bath.
That absolutely wretched song was originally recorded by Michael Jackson when he was about nine years old. (I can hear the nascent psychopathy in every note.)
The featured rodent is not a member of Rattus norvegicus. It's one of the tropical giants, probably Cricetomys gambianus, the Gambian pouched rat. Another prolific exotic animal we don't need on this continent. (The odds of finding a giant tropical rat associated with someone with a plethora of tattoos and piercings is unity.)
If demographics are destiny, please note that "r-a-t-s" are 44 percent of "d-e-m-o-c-r-a-t-s" AND the most rapidly increasing!
Donate the rats to science.
Planned Pethood
Flowers for Algernon is a short novelette[5] by American author Daniel Keyes, which he later expanded into a novel and adapted for film and other media. The novelette, written in 1958 and first published in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction in 1960.[6] The novel was published in 1966 and was joint winner of that year's Nebula Award for Best Novel (with Babel-17).[7]
Algernon is a laboratory mouse who has undergone surgery to increase his intelligence. The story is told by a series of progress reports written by Charlie Gordon, the first human subject for the surgery, and it touches on ethical and moral themes such as the treatment of the mentally disabled.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon
"Humans cannot mimic the kind of social interaction they need from another rat."
I'll bet Jacob Frey could.
This was a subplot in a recent All Creatures ep. Siegfried was so depressed by the absence of Mrs Hall that he let his pet rats have the run of the house. CC, JSM
I had a pet rat as a kid. Very gentle and affectionate.
One of my sons had pet rats for a while. Properly cared for, they are very clean and odor free. But they are short-lived, three years tops.
Yeah, I was wondering if they'd let snake owners get in on the adoption action.
Since two rats + three weeks = twenty rats, a snake that eats one rat a week (that would be a big snake) can't solve the problem. You'll need a lot more snakes, but that presents another problem. A brace of Kerry blue terriers, now there's a solution. Add in a whippet or two for the more fleetfooted pests, and you got the makings of a rat Final Solution.
"Inside Crispin Glover’s House in the Czech Republic" (Architectural Digest).
Reproductive rats. Abort.
"Since two rats + three weeks = twenty rats, a snake that eats one rat a week (that would be a big snake) can't solve the problem. "
I wasn't picturing the snakes set loose in the house. I was picturing snake owners offering to take whatever number they could use. I presume an organization bent on loving the rats and getting kindly people to adopt would reject the snake owners. But with 450 rats to offload, I think maybe the would allow it.
Nixon's CREEP turned ratfucking into an art form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Segretti
I wonder if people get oxytocin released when they toss a rat into a snake aquarium.
Adopt a DemocRAT? Send it to Planned Politicianhood.
Roosevelt''s Palmer was the precedent.
Ann Althouse said...
I presume an organization bent on loving the rats and getting kindly people to adopt would reject the snake owners.
You think if someone asked for one rat every 2 weeks they would get suspicious?
I wonder if our cat could still kill a rat. She is probably more capable than she lets on.
I wonder if we would get oxytocin out of watching our cat kill a rat.
My wife clearly gets adrenaline and cortisol when the cat brings in a bird or a frog.
Thinking Fast and Slow is by Dan
Kahneman. Interesting, but not particularly novel.
I wasn't picturing the snakes set loose in the house.
Nor was I. My point was the appetites of even a large number of pet snakes is problematic compared compared to the rat population in that house. Some snakes will only eat live prey. People who keep them already have an adequately supply. Jaq's idea about feeding them to zoo animals might work -- lots of predators with hotblooded appetites.
I most certainly got an oxytocin boost seeing the video of the subway rat scurrying away with a slice of pizza
Now, dang it, I never made that connection between Crispin and his dad, Bruce. He was a really good character actor, and their personnae/characters definitely carry a family resemblance.
“The walls and ceilings were alive with rats; great swarms of them scampered across the stone floors, rustled in the partitions, clattered in the chimneys, and squeaked and snuffled in the darkness behind the hangings. They were above me, beneath me, within me; as though the building itself were a single, gigantic hive of sordid, detestable life.” HP Lovecraft, “The Rats in the Walls” (1924)
Michael Jackson sang the movie's song. That was before he lost his therapy rat and went off the rails.
I used to feel bad, when I was a kid, we would go down to the rail yard and flip over boards, and shoot the rats with a slingshot. The rats had a sporting chance, but now I see that we were performing a public service.
Reminded me of this story from This American Life some years ago (during the pandemic, I think):
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/must-be-rats-on-the-brain/act-one-36
Oh yeah. "Do rats see little rats?"
The perplexing question remains.
AI : "While the Black Death significantly solidified the modern cultural hatred of rats, human aversion to them predates the 14th-century pandemic and stems from older evolutionary and practical factors."
In short (AI goes on and on): "Rats and mice destroyed vital grain stores and crops
They were known to ruin clothing and essential fabrics.
A fear of being bitten (daknophobia) may have contributed to a natural "fight or flight" response when encountering them in dark or confined spaces."
My dog (currently dozing next to me on the couch) is part rat terrier. She would make quick work of the rats.
"Flowers for Algernon" was much better than "Babel-17", IMHO.
"Flowers" was much closer to the "Golden Age" SF in style and theme - one wouldnt think so if one has only a passing acquaintance with 1940s-50s SF, but it is so. Though lacking space ships and ray guns, it is actually "hard" SF - exploring the human fallout of one bit of technology that is plausibly within a speculative range (though often seeming close, it has proven elusive to this day).
Babel-17 is firmly of the 1960s "New Age" SF (as defined by Harlan Ellison).
The latest form Florida Man.
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