lordmongrove
Justified & Ancient
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Desperate New York City authorities to sterilize rats
http://rt.com/usa/new-york-rat-sterilization-340/
Gotham authorities are testing a new weapon against the city’s famously tenacious rats – a poison that brings on menopause in females. Now, researchers must decide what morsel to combine the chemical with in order to tempt the animals to eat it.
"Our product is not designed to eradicate any species. That's a human error that needs to not be repeated,” said Dr. Loretta Mayer, co-founder of SenesTech, the company that developed the chemical compound.
"It's a very natural thing. We're just accelerating it in these animals."
Female rats can produce up to 12 pups a litter, and will give birth as many as five times during their life cycles. The sterilization compound, dubbed ContraPest, targets the ovarian follicles and renders the pests sterile within five to ten days of ingestion.
Thomas Lamb, chief of innovation and technology for New York City Transit, says the new approach is a result of the futility of the current methods used to combat the city’s estimated population of several hundred thousand rodents.
"We basically bait, trap and kill. If we just continue to do that, every year we'll have the same expense and the same result," he said.
Under the current methods, the city has to poison more rats than are born, but even if it succeeds in doing so, the problem is rarely solved. The surviving rats are then left with a food surplus, and produce large litters that quickly rebuild the population.
And in the unlikely scenario that all the rats would be killed, other animals from neighboring regions would quickly swoop in.
The point of the plan currently in place is to create a constant, but smaller population of older and quieter rats through lower birth rates.
Now, the problem is to get the animals to eat the poison.
The rodents have highly developed taste, and can detect as little of two parts per million of poison in their food.
"Rats in Laos, they like coconut. But the rats in Indonesia prefer fish flavor," said Mayer, whose product has already been used in rural areas around the world. "You have to be very much one with the animal."
SenesTech has been given a grant of over $1 million by the National Institutes of Health to find the perfect bait.
Dr. Robert Corrigan, a prominent rodentologist, told the Wall Street Journal that variations in taste are determined by what the rats usually have in their diets.
"Rats that grow up, say, from the dumpster behind a fast food chicken place, will love chicken. Bagel place, bagels. And so on."
The bait will be flavored with different tastes and smells, potentially as varied as donuts, cookies or ham. Each one will contain a dye that can be detected in rats’ whiskers in a post-mortem, so that scientists can see which flavor they preferred.
"We really won't know what works until we get in there," said Mayer.
She added that if the generic bait is not successful, the poison may have to be placed inside discarded pepperoni slices. But despite such tempting packages for the poison, Mayer stressed that eating the bait would have no consequences for humans.
“Well, it’s quite sweet, quite salty and there’s a lot of fat. Anyone who tried it would probably gain weight from the fat,” she said.
This Is What Happens When A Rat Rides The New York City Subway (VIDEO)
The Huffington Post | by Chrsitopher Mathias
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/0 ... 12089.html
Posted: 04/08/2014 12:35 pm EDT Updated: 04/08/2014 1:59 pm EDT
A very unwelcome passenger boarded a Brooklyn-bound A train on Monday morning in New York City.
"A usually boring Monday morning commute to work at Brooklyn was stirred up by this little guy," writes Jinais Ponnampadikkal Kader on YouTube, where he posted a video of a large rat scurrying around a subway car, sending his fellow commuters into a frenzy.
"[The rat] joined us at the Fulton street station on the A train going downtown. Someone getting off the train was screaming 'RAT on the train!' But by the time everyone realized what was happening, the doors closed and the train entered the tunnel. We were stuck with him till the other end."
Most of the straphangers in the video can be seen jumping up onto their seats, while others just lift their legs. Almost everybody takes out phones and begins filming the mayhem.
While there's a lot of screaming, there's also a lot of laughter and smiles. And hey, at least the rat didn't crawl over anyone's face.
Woman fills rival's house with rats in fight over boyfriend: cops 8
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/0 ... 12089.html
DANIEL KELLEY, REUTERS
FIRST POSTED: FRIDAY, APRIL 04, 2014 02:54 PM EDT | UPDATED: FRIDAY, APRIL 04, 2014 02:59 PM EDT
PHILADELPHIA - How do you get the attention of a girl who has everything - including your boyfriend?
One woman seeking revenge on a romantic rival smashed the windows of her South Philadelphia home and dumped a box of live white rats inside, police said.
"I'd have to say this is a first," Officer Christine O'Brien said on Thursday.
In a long-running dispute over a man, the jealous lover and about eight other women friends used a baseball bat to break the glass and toss the rodents inside at about 11 p.m. Wednesday in the Grays Ferry neighborhood, Philadelphia police said.
The gang also punched the 30-year-old victim, inflicting cuts and bruises, and stole her purse containing identification and about $200, police said.
The victim was able to identify at least one of the attackers, who fled in a Chevy Lumina.
Woman Claims Rats Ate Her House
The Huffington Post | by Andres Jauregui
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/0 ... 19932.html
Posted: 04/09/2014 2:59 pm EDT Updated: 04/09/2014 3:00 pm EDT Print Article
An Australian woman whose ceiling collapsed on her blames rats, and she says the vermin are eating her house from the inside out.
Ann Barker said that her daughter had to pull her out from beneath the rubble after the bathroom ceiling at her Melbourne home came down on her Tuesday.
She told 3 AW that her new house, which she has only lived in for four months, has suffered serious damage due to an apparent infestation by rats.
“At this stage they’ve chewed through nine pipes, and I’ve got two more leaks,” Barker said. “There were holes under my veranda and holes on the corner of the roof where the guttering is. I’m waiting for someone to check the rest of the roof.”
She says that neither the home builder nor her insurance will help her. And it appears she's not the only person in the area to report problems with rats.
According to News.com.au, a woman who lives in the suburb of Dandenong in southeast Melbourne, called into a radio show to complain that homes in her area have been plagued by rats.
monops said:We used to have two Jack Russells. One of them was an absolutely amazing ratter, and it was quite something to watch him digging for them and tearing lumps of grass roots out with his teeth to get them out of their burrows. He used to kill them very efficiently and quickly, too. His all time best performance was on a smallholding where the remains of a potato clamp had been left to rot under a tarpaulin, and several families of rats had moved in. He had a wonderful time as the tarpaulin was peeled back; I have a picture somewhere of him standing in our hallway afterwards, with his little bandy legs and his face back to the ears black and stinking of decomposed potato...
The other Jack, interestingly enough, doesn't have a clue. He used to watch the pro (no longer with us, sadly) with his tail wagging slowly and his head on one side; you could see him thinking, "What ARE you doing?"
monops said:Cochise, he needs a kind owner with a spade digging into the back of the burrow to help flush them towards him
ramonmercado, it's interesting you say that. Mac, the one in question, was a rescue, so we don't know about his parentage, but he is big for a Jack and has unusual slanted eyes. We wonder if there's some bull terrier in there.
ramonmercado said:monops said:Cochise, he needs a kind owner with a spade digging into the back of the burrow to help flush them towards him
ramonmercado, it's interesting you say that. Mac, the one in question, was a rescue, so we don't know about his parentage, but he is big for a Jack and has unusual slanted eyes. We wonder if there's some bull terrier in there.
I had a big Jack as well, definitely a mix in there. But he carried on like a 100% Jack. Even put an Irish Wolfhound to flight.
krakenten said:Estimates on rat numbers are silly.
Does somebody count them? No, it's a guess.
And it'll vary according to the interests involved.
Spudrick68 said:Monops - "Fenton, Fenton...oh Jesus Christ". if you haven't seen the clip look on you tube.
A new study has found that New York City’s rats are hosts to at least 18 new viruses, never before encountered and unknown to science. There is a risk of a “a public health nightmare.”
The research was conducted by a team from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, who analyzed viruses in Manhattan rats.
“Everybody’s looking all over the world, in all sorts of exotic places, including us. But nobody’s looking right under our noses,” Ian Lipkin, a professor of neurology and pathology at Columbia, told the New York Times.
The initial report was published in mBio magazine on Tuesday and focused on 133 rats scientists had analyzed that had demonstrated a variety of pathogens. Some of them transmit food-borne diseases, and some, like Seoul Hantavirus, have never been seen in New York before. Finally, there are at least 18 completely new pathogens to science.
Two pathogens are similar to one that causes Hepatitis C and could help the researchers fight the disease. ...
http://rt.com/usa/197268-rat-ny-viruses-pathogens/
More pests were dealt with in Wales per person than in any other country in the UK last year, according to the British Pest Control Association (BPCA). Welsh local authorities treated pests nearly 50,000 times - rats alone caused 27,198 problems.
One of the more unusual problems was an infestation of tarantula-type spiders in a child's bedroom in Aberdare.
Wales had three times more call-outs for rats than Scotland and 11 times more than Northern Ireland.
The Chartered Institute for Environmental Health (CIEH) says the figures, obtained from a freedom of information request to all UK local authorities, are "significant".
Julie Barratt from CIEH said: "2013 was an exceptional year weather-wise and in bad weather the rats will look for somewhere to go. There are not more rats, they are just more visible. "Rats have always caused problems for public health. The best thing people can do is make sure their homes are resistant. ...
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-30131295