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I take it you've still got a "buddy" living in your stove there, cmonkey? I could mail you my cat. He'll take care of it. Or have you tried the sticky traps? They're all that's ever worked for us.
Ugh, I remember we had rats in a place shithole I lived in during college. Our landlord didn't believe us, so we put down poison ourselves. Sitting watching tv one night and this humungous rat just wanders into the middle of the living room and dies in front of us. Yeah.
I think we've evicted it from the stove, but it's still somewhere in the house - I found evidence of it going into the bathtub to get water last night. It's too smart for the snap traps (it somehow managed to gingerly dodge two of them to drag a tea packet into the nest in the oven!) and the cat shows no interest in doing anything about it. Not that I can blame her, it's a big rat. We're tempted to use glue traps, but while I'd like to see the corpse, I don't know if I'd like to see the corpse after it tries to gnaw off it's own legs. I think we're being outsmarted :-(
These experiences I had in New Orleans: huge, aggressive, fearless rats in our office that had people standing on top of their desks several times a day; if you encountered one of these rats and made stomping and hissing actions towards it, it would make stomping and hissing actions towards you. And you backed the fuck off.
Next, in our favorite French Quarter grocery, standing in front of the the meat counter to get something, an effing monster giant rat falls from the ceiling at our feet - because he was just too fucking heavy for the ceiling tiles to support his weight.
I loved New Orleans, but jesusgod, I don't miss the rats and cockroaches.
Thanksgiving in the East Village 1988 or thereabouts: I'm excited because it's my first Thanksgiving in NY and some of my friends are coming from Baltimore for dinner. Because I live in a shithole tenement on 13th street, I'm standing outside all dressed up so I can let them in. It's snowing and I look to my right and see that I am not the only one happy about the holiday: there must have been 10 or 15 rats of all sizes frolicking in the snow, on and around the trash cans directly next to me. They were having a great time and I watched them for a while and thought, well, this is New York and I'm really here, aren't I? Later that year (after the crazy lady downstairs threw three of them screaming in a trap at me) I would not be so amused by their antics.
Oh, jrossi... you really don't want to know about our first office; it was on top of a very popular Italian restaurant, where, needless to say, none of us ever ate - after we started working there. I can't. even. begin. to describe the stuff we saw in that place walking in to work in the morning through the kitchen entrance. OMG, let's just say, it's good we were all young and resilient, because if I had to deal with it today - just, catch me when I fall, and carry me straight to the coroner's office.
We thought the second space would be better, and it was wonderfully historic; Fats Domino recorded "Blueberry Hill" in our paste-up room (where we laid out the newspaper, back before digital). But the rats there were actually more aggressive and territorial - maybe because the place had been vacant for some period before we got it. There was a giant back room where we kept back issues of the newspaper, plus a fridge and a small table and a couple of chairs. Since it was the 80s, we would spend quite a bit of time in the back room when things were slow, always with champagne in the fridge, and certain recreationals on hand... but we would hover right by the door leading to the main office space, in terror of the massive, leaping, hissing rats that totally owned the back room. If we weren't such fallen angels, I don't think we would ever have gone back there willingly, and I'm pretty sure nobody did, alone. Our code words for "I have a little something-something to share" were "I guess I need to go look it up in the back room", stated loudly enough that five minutes later there were at least six people huddled in the back room, right by the door, drinking champagne from real glass flutes, sniffing a bit, and peering around fearfully for monster rats.
Pretty much all of the '80s seems like a strange, surreal dream I had - and this is probably the one of the least exotic reasons.
I have beat them to death in Micronesia, where they carried off entire packages of Ramen, trapped them in Louisville, and now I am buying two as pets in Utah.
You cannot imagine the size of the rats in India. The first time I saw one, I literally thought it was a cat.
One of the most horrifying sights of my life: peering three stories down into an elevator shaft in India, shortly after the beginning of monsoon. Thousands of rats had teemed into the shaft, seeking shelter from the torrents of water in the drainage pipes that were their homes for the dry season.
I thought the darkness at the bottom of the shaft was shadows, but then I realized the shadows were writhing.
My brother was talking to me from a payphone in Spanish Harlem where he was visiting a friend. While he was talking he said "Hey- a possum just walked by." I could overhear the friend respond, "We don't have possums."
Yeah, fun pets. When I cleaned the cage of mine in grade school we found cuff links from my fathers dresser drawer, we didn't even know that they were getting out and returning nightly.
And any plague-related bad rap is BS, because the Norway rats we know were the ones that actually stopped the plague my displacing Ratimus Raticus or whatever the disease-vector rat was called.
the thing that squicked me out the most in Baltimore wasn't so much the giant rats frolicking in every dark doorway, dumpster and alley... it was the ginormous rat ROADKILL that was literally.fucking.everywhere!!! in the streets.
if you don't get me, just think about it for a bit. I was carless in Baltimore, and the thought of riding a bike everywhere, every day, in the (all too frequent) rain, with massive ratburgers everywhere in the streets... yea. ew.
to be fair, the copious piss and dumpster-juice everywhere in the alleys grossed me out too. I dunno why I don't notice that stuff here in Denver, but maybe it's just that they run the street sweepers more often around here.
One night lo these many years ago when I lived in South Williamsburg I was walking back from my friend's house to my own house and I saw a rat haul ass past me and scamper down the street. I blinked mildly at it, as I was feeling pretty relaxed and then a FUCKING SEA of rats came charging from behind me and passed all around man, a carpet of dirty grey and brown, chittering and flowing down the street. Maybe two thousand rats? It took them about a minute to get past me. One rat, one rat ran over my shoe, I kept walking the whole time because I guessed that if I stopped they might decide to climb all over me. Some kind of rat migration, it was the easily the longest minute of my life.
About two years ago, I was eating with a co-worker called Vanessa at a hotel in Stony Stratford (outdoors - it was summer) and we saw two huge rats. She LOST IT completely. I think we got a free meal out of it, but the manager basically shrugged it off. I guess he was used it.
I love rats. I've had them as pets since I was a kid. I even get a little excited when I see one in the alley. Not like I'm going to pick it up and give it a kiss, but still excited.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
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