Rats!

Garcia had pulled up in the darkness just as Alegre was finishing his prep work at the warehouse. When Garcia opened the back of his Isotech truck, out wafted the atrocious odor of decomposing rats.

"Yeah, I got some doozies in there from a housing development in Newport Beach yesterday," he said. "Three fat, juicy ones. I gotta throw them out."

<img src=http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j278/oilyrags/evilmickey.jpg>;

<img src=http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j278/oilyrags/evilminnie.jpg>;

I'm down to my last trap now, so I sure as hell hope that takes care of it. Monday, when I turn in my rent, I'll suggest to the apt. manager that the maintenance crew invest in some quik-crete. These guys, btw, died within a couple of hours of each other yesterday evening, the first around sunset. I had guests over, who found the experience not as charming as you might hope.

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j278/oilyrags/evilmickey.jpg

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j278/oilyrags/evilminnie.jpg

Get one of these. You never see the rat/mouse and you can use them over and over. They are pretty cheap at Home Depot.

http://www.amazon.com/Victor-M252-Electronic-Mouse-Trap/dp/B000E1RIUU/ref=pd_bbs_10?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1227978511&sr=8-10

Well, I'd already gotten a plastic reusable snap trap. And found it to be effective. See?

<a href=http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j278/oilyrags/evilmickeyjr.jpg<;/a>

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j278/oilyrags/evilmickeyjr.jpg

Oh my god. I thought one tiny mouse in our apt last year was bad enough. I would completely freak out if there was a a rat nevermind two!! I feel a little sick just looking at those tails. *shudder*

Dammit!! That was enbb - not RS.

Three, SO FAR!

get a cat

More of a dog guy, but this being a one-bedroom apt. there's no yard. A kitty would be ok, I guess, but I wouldn't want any pet of mine catching god-knows-what kind of diseases or infections from these naked-tailed fuckers anyway.

I did try to borrow one (also a high-spirited little terrier) but for some reason, no one wants their put catching etc..

I still think a gallon or so of quik-crete down that hole in the floor is the best solution here.

cats will keep them from ever bothering to come into your apartment, though. in my experience anyway.

Cats fucking regulate that shit.

Cats are nice. But they don't plug up holes in the floor.

FUCK.

We have an electric mouse trap but this fucker just moves it around trying to get into it, it's too big.

WTF cats?? Hello?

Actually don't sic your cats on it, I think rats can take animals quite a bit larger than themselves. Esp if there's more than one.

It's obviously hungry, it's been out 3 times since I got home tonight, and we haven't seen it before tonight. I've put a hammer in the kitchen but it always gets back in the cupboard before I can get the near it.

I put one of my cats in the cupboard where it's hanging out and it went nuts sniffing around so I'm hoping the smell of feline will put the bastard off, that worked when we had mice a few weeks ago, they went once they encountered the cats.

Just want to point out I don't live in a disgusting hell-hole, I just live right near a market, so there's a lot of vermin around. Oh wait, maybe I do live in a disgusting hell-hole. TBH I just wanna know what the hell the foxes are doing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8398734.stm

o_OOOOOOOOOO

like how low can you go, seriously

Does the approved diet of the contestants include other meat sources of any kind? Rat who lived in jungle until its throat was slit almost certainly had a better life than any of the food served officially.

okay, this is horribly gross and will haunt my dreams

Ravenous waves attack,
drawn by the scent of life
Fever for our blood

Instinct rules this mass, ruthless living sea
Devouring

Countless vermin gnashing at my face
Tear meat from my skull
Swarming, rabid, features are erased
Unrecognizable
Body covered, rat filled innards
Shred internal organs
Heart and lungs consumed from inside but my
pain doesn't end
I have not died

Devour, cesspool of vermin
Devour, bloodthristy rabid
Devoured by vermin

Resistance now gives way,
the rodents freely feed
Tearing at my skin
Muscles are exposed, shining red with blood
Meat that they seek

Crawling rodents gorging on me

Repulsive starving droves
Shredding, stripping, consuming all I was
Tissue pulled from bones
Dying slowly, feeling every fang
Shock has yet to come
Scavengers tear out my eyes
My pain won't end, I have not died

Devour, cesspool of vermin
Devour, bloodthristy rabid
Devoured by vermin

Ruthless gnawing vermin - feed
Cleaning off my bones while I breathe
Stenching greasy rodents - swarm
My body is losing its form

[Lead - Owen]
[Lead - Barrett]

Devour, cesspool of vermin
Devour, bloodthristy rabid
Devoured by vermin

hell yeah

i would have sung that to the huge rat if it scurried up my sleeve.

I hope you would have accapelaed the solos as well.

that part's the rat's job.

rat's gotta do somethin'.

http://shakhtar.com/en/team/player/?id=55

Crap cats
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=50a_1290191426

that rat isnt corageous. it's rabid.

i was tryna find this story about some crazy old women who fed rats in their upscale new england (iirc) neighbourhood to the chagrin of local residents

ugh. she is crazy.

crossposted from the noise board:

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/08/25/2011-08-25_giant_rat_killed_by_pitchfork_in_marcy_houses_is_believed_to_be_.html?r=ny_local&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nydnrss%2Fny_local+%28NY+Local%29

http://bengpr.webs.com/

o_O

see them quite often in Oxford. They don't freak me out. My wife hates them however. She's not too keen on mice, but loves squirrels.

Are our responses to animals culturally determined or somehow inherent? Has there been much research in this area? People quite often cite bare tails as a reason for their "ugh!" response to mice and rats cf the furry tails of squirrels.

squirrels are never friendly they are using you to get yoru nuts

you've got to be fucking kidding

no lie bro

We have holes under a tree in the front garden ... Wondering if it is rats (Cat recently caught one but not sure from where).

Fucking huge beast in my bathroom just now! I freaked out and bolted, plucked up my courage a few minutes later and went back in, and it had gone. Probably an anomaly, I have a cat.

We showed estate agents around this morning as well, glad it wasn't there then!

ooh, my friend has a rat problem ATM too. I don't envy you. We had one in our kitchen and it ate through the pipes down to the floor below which was a bakery and it flooded. The landlord did sod all about it so we ended up moving in the end.

I'm hoping it's a sewer rat that wandered in by mistake and won't be coming back.

well I spose the new place was a bit too good to be true

Ugh, had one in the wall of the garage (which is shared with our dining room/kitchen) and I could hear the fucking thing scratching and gnawing at night, which I would try to stop by banging on the wall... exterminator, in the meantime, takes a fucking five day vacation and I couldn't get a replacement without paying for it, just assures me the trap will get it. After 9 days no luck.

So last night I finally ignore my fucking insanely high levels of anxiety over this and listen to music on headphones all night; towards morning I hear a weird THUNK! a couple of times, think maybe it's the trap, decide I'm too tired to fuck with it and go to bed. Turns out it was the rat breaking through the wall behind the bar between the kitchen and dining room and it spent the day zipping in and out eating cat food. Get home tonight and the exterminator - finally back! - moved the trap inside, it kills it within an hour. Seriously. So now I'll feel compelled to listen to my anxiety screaming in my head forever BECAUSE LOOK WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON'T BRO!!!!!!!!!

And the exterminator says he thinks it's just the one but I stuffed the hole with steel wool and block it with bricks... he can come reset the trap in the morning but right now I'm not taking any shit if I can help it.

I am TOTALLY freaked out btw because this is the first time I've ever had a rat in my house. Mice, bugs, even bats, but none freaked me out to quite the same extent.

Cats did NOTHING btw. ASSHOLES.

i don't like them

I'm a fan but I guess where I live they're not really a pest problem.

I like them.

Never had any in my dwelling mind you.

I petted a pet rat once, closed its wee eyes as I stroked its wee head

We had them in the very last restaurant I worked in. Came down through a pipe and would occasionally walk across the soda fountain.

I no longer work in restaurants

One day it appeared during business hours and the manager told an employee to get rid of it.

He stepped on its head and it let out the most bloodcurdling shriek as it died. I don't like rats but i kept hearing that poor thing shriek all night and felt terrible for it.

I no longer work in restaurants.

i grew up in arizona, where rats-as-pests aren't really a thing. you might see a packrat in your shed, maybe. so i've always just thought of them as pets and was really surprised the first time i heard a friend from new york go on about how horrific and frightening they are. so hearing about people killing them still makes me shudder a bit. i suppose it's more the association with dirtiness and disease that makes them scary to people. like, cockroaches are frightening and revolting when they appear in your home but you probably wouldn't think twice about seeing one outside if you didn't already have that association in your mind.

that's true actually. the big, disgusting American roaches actually used to be less repulsive to me than the tiny German roaches, not because they were less gross, but because I knew the Americans probably came from outdoors and might not be permanently nesting there, and are usually easier to get rid of with traps, whereas Germans, once they settle, they're almost impossible to eradicate.

on the street, yeah they're still repulsive but that urge to shrink and run isn't there cos you're outside.

the only rats I've seen since the restaurant days were in my old apartment complex, which had a massive raccoon and rat problem, largely because assholes were using the mail trashbin to throw out their burritos and other fast food. some nights I'd come home from hanging out downtown and would go to the mail area to get my mail, and there'd be two, sometimes three raccoons practically standing in front of my mail slot, occasionally one or two rats as well. and i'd say "nah i'm good I'll get the mail in the morning" and go home.

https://i.imgur.com/zvqEQaq.jpg

There's a rat living in the front garden. Most of the time, I feel remarkably unbothered about it (If it comes into the house, that would be a different matter).

Just sat and watched him on the bird feeder ... which did make me think, I should perhaps stop feeding the birds? Anything else I should be doing to encourage it to "move along".

bird food is a major attractant but you can get stuff that makes less mess than other types, depending on what birds you're getting e.g. you could switch to niger seed feeders for goldfinches (seeds are too small for rats to bother with), peanut feeders for tits (less waste falling on the floor). if you've got sunflower seed, you could try chopping the seed up in a blender to make it more bite-size so again less waste will end up on the ground. there are specific 'no mess' seed mixes, but they're not totally reliable - ime the birds sift through it for the good stuff and jettison all the stuff they don't like. maybe try putting the feeders over a hard surface and sweep up regularly? other than that, i read once that rats don't really like a lot of change in their environment, so perhaps you could regularly disturb the area they're living in, move stuff around, block holes with bricks, do a bit of digging, that sort of thing just to fuck them off a bit.

we had a rat living in behind our fridge for a while, didn't know it was there but the dog would keep going into this weird state of high alertness in the middle of the night because he was probably hearing scratchy, ratty noises coming from the kitchen. anyhow, it was obviously climbing up the back of the fridge to a box that we kept all our bird seed in and munching through that. it was only when i went to replenish the feeders and saw all the shredded bags etc that i knew we had a rodent in the house. didn't last too long though - one morning soon after, the dog finally caught him scurrying across the floor and bit off his head.

after the Great Undoing, only cockroaches, rats and nickb's dog shall persist

for every rat you see, there's a hundred you don't see

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ksxsvx4OL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

the remake with Crispin Glover was really good!

x-post to Andy: Yeah, I figure that there's more than one - they've been there for years. I've definitely said "For every one you can see, there's ten" on social media before!

it's also really impressive what they are able to chew through.

i caught a mouse yesterday! shld probably dig up a dedicated mouse thread to brag.

but on topic, we had a guest last year. we’d hear it rustling about occasionally and one day i caught a glimpse of a furry little tail disappearing behind a bookshelf. we’re on the 5th floor, so figured it wasn’t an invader from outside, but rather someone’s escaped pet, and based on the tail i was excitedly envisioning a chinchilla.

http://image.blingee.com/images15/content/output/000/000/000/395/184058256_1400049.gif

i googled chinchilla food and went out to a store at 11 p.m. for timothy hay to stash around the apartment so it wouldn’t go hungry and mocked up a “found: chinchilla!” poster to put up around the building once we actually caught it, and mr. cat borrowed a hav-a-hart trap and fancy chinchilla cage from the humane society the next day. that evening we pinpointed its location to the corner of the living room under the couch, so we set up an elaborate funnel-type structure of furniture and blankets from the couch to the opening of the (luxuriously appointed) cage, and i squeezed under the couch with a broom to gently encourage our little visitor in the direction of its new home while mr. cat stayed out, ready to herd it towards the cage if necessary. after a bit of prodding and encouragement, we captured our prey! it was this:

http://www.fieldguide1966.com/uploads/1/3/4/4/13447245/6970387_orig.gif

lookit how cute, awww

There's a rat living in the garage roof or thereabouts. Undecided what my plan should be ...

Poison, man. We have set all manner of traps and tricks and the little bastards get around them by some kind of rat magic. We had one(s) living under our floorboards and getting out into the kitchen in various ways. Very not fun.

poison’s tricky cuz if yr buddy dies inside a wall you can end up with the aroma of decaying rat corpse until it dries up/rots away/is tidied up by maggot friends (and then you have flies, wheeee). or if the poisoned rat gets et by an innocent hungry scavenger, or somebody’s dog, or somebody’s innocent hungry scavenger dog, that critter could be killed by the poison as well! also if someone you know gets murdered with rat poison and the cops then find rat poison in yr house you will probably get the chair.

have you considered a snake.

Also if you or your neighbours have a garden there’s a good chance the rat can spread the poison there.
I have had success using traditional rat traps.

same, get the big plastic ones that are easy to reset and use peanut butter for bait

PB worked for me too.

I had success with live traps. As told in another thread, I catch them, load them in the car, put on 'People Ain't No Good', and drive them to a field with many hawks and owls to release.

Snap traps work but the rat can run around for awhile before passing. You might have a dead rat search on your hands.

shneyyyyk

https://www.videoman.gr/en/179305

I've successfully used electronic traps to kill mice. I imagine that the rat version is significantly bulkier, but it'll definitely do the trick.

I've also caught mice with the electronic traps but our rats ignored them for the months we had them on.

aah-ooh-aahh-ahhhhh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81A4tN7Wo1Y

Have always wanted to try one of these sorts of homemade contraptions. Spoiler: in the beginning of the video it looks as though he is trying to drown the rats (which some people do), but the rats are revealed to be alive at the end.