Rats! Rats! Rats!

[ramonmercado]

Rats fall out with Murdoch?

Sky and TalkTalk broadband down in South London after RATS chew through fibre cables
Sky and TalkTalk broadband customers in parts of South London were unable to access the network last night and this morning ...

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/sky-broadband-network-down-south-10968681

 

[Merle]

When I was a kid about 60 years back my farther came home one night and
said he had been walking home and had he passed a doorway a copper dragged him
in told him "the rats are moving" next thing the st is full of rat's wall to wall all
heading the same way like a river, once they had gone he carried on home and
did not see another rat, he did say that he thought he would have been in some
danger if the cop had not pulled him into the doorway, I have never seen anything
like that but don't doubt he saw what he said but have never heard of it since,
though the cop acting as he did makes me think he had seen it before.

Living in Australia and having lived in the remote isolated hot desert ouback for years I can easily believe that story. However, for us it's not rats, but on occassions, mice plagues and they come out by the droves at night looking for food. With nothing much for them to eat where I lived, they then ended up eating all the books, the paper work and anything which they deemed edible which incidently was a lot of things including plastic, soap etc.

It didn't happen often, but when it did it was horrible and very hard to sleep at night with mice wanting to crawl around all over the place including you while you slept. There was never enough rat traps or poison to buy because it was long all sold out and anyway, the closest shops were over a 3 hour drive there and then another 3 hours plus back.

One night a friend who was visiting and hadn't seen this before had bandges on his leg from bad cuts only to wake up during the night to find the mice had eaten away not only a part of his bandages, but were nibbling at his flesh. The only reason he was so slow to notice was because he was drunk, totally out of it when he went to sleep that night... poor buggar, he was in a pretty bad state though we did tell him that's what happens when you drink with mice... Here's a recent picture of a mice plague...
.
.

 

[RaM]

I've heard of something like that, but only in works of fiction.
In a town or city, I can't imagine what kind of predator or danger would cause them to exhibit such behaviour.

The area as now been redeveloped and if memory serves there was a tannery in that
area demolition of such a place may have stirred them up.

 

[RaM]

There was a documentary of some sorts on UK tv about mice swarms in Australia
a few years back little buggers eat everything.
amazing.

 

[UnknownUnknown]

When I was a kid about 60 years back my farther came home one night and
said he had been walking home and had he passed a doorway a copper dragged him
in told him "the rats are moving" next thing the st is full of rat's wall to wall all
heading the same way like a river, once they had gone he carried on home and
did not see another rat, he did say that he thought he would have been in some
danger if the cop had not pulled him into the doorway, I have never seen anything
like that but don't doubt he saw what he said but have never heard of it since,
though the cop acting as he did makes me think he had seen it before.

Wait, where are you from? This rings a bell - is there an account of something similar in the book 'The Hounding Of David Oluwale' by Kester Aspden. It's about the police in Leeds and their probable murder of a man called David Oluwale in 1968. The cityscape of Leeds is an important aspect of the book. It's portrayed as fairly Dickensian at that time.

 

[Merle]

Wait, where are you from? This rings a bell - is there an account of something similar in the book 'The Hounding Of David Oluwale' by Kester Aspden. It's about the police in Leeds and their probable murder of a man called David Oluwale in 1968. The cityscape of Leeds is an important aspect of the book. It's portrayed as fairly Dickensian at that time.

That book sounds quite interesting......

Being a book lover and always on the lookout for both fictional and real life crime stories as well as strange biographies and autographies, I had look at ebay for it and found a second hand copy which seems to be in a decent condition and cheap enough... immediately ordered it... thanks... will take a few weeks to get to me from the UK but well worth the wait...

What a bonus, a real life crime story featuring rats... thanks...

 

[UnknownUnknown]

Oh wow, it's an amazing book. I'm always trying to get people to read it! So pleased that I may have succeeded this time without even trying. Hope I'm right about the rat bit. I can't lay my hands on my copy just now so let us know if you find the description!

 

[Merle]

Oh wow, it's an amazing book. I'm always trying to get people to read it! So pleased that I may have succeeded this time without even trying. Hope I'm right about the rat bit. I can't lay my hands on my copy just now so let us know if you find the description!

Arhh, it wasn't so much the possibility of rats making an appearance which drew me in... it's the storyline and the way you described it which did....

After I read it I'll pass it onto my youngest sister who also shares the same reading interests as I do except she's also into all those fantasy type stories which do nothing much for me...

I will let you know, but because it has to travel right to other side of the world delivery date isn't estimated until between August 31st and 7th September... so I'll be twiddling my thumbs until then...

 

[RaM]

It happened in Bury Lancs cant remember the st name but pretty sure
he was in the doorway of what is now the registry office, as for Dickensian
at that time and for many years after there were places in Bury that made
Dickens time seem darn right modern, I used to go into a factory in the
70's were the phones were wind up and the place in such a state I could
not imagine how they did not have a fatality every day.

 

[EnolaGaia]

RE: Prior allusions to rats swarming in the streets ...

(EDIT for update)

In the older Rats (not to be confused with this Rats!) thread there were three such incidents mentioned in that thread, starting with post #18.

The two threads have now been merged, and the posts to which I allude appear on the earliest pages of this now-combined thread.

 

[RaM]

Called at a very new as in not yet fully open NHS site the other day
and though I saw no rats I did see lots of rat bait as in poison boxes about.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here's a news item practically guaranteed to creep you out ...

French girl mutilated by rats in night attack at home
A disabled French girl covered in rat bites is critically ill in hospital after a pack swarmed into her bedroom in north-eastern France.

The 14-year-old paraplegic was sleeping on the ground floor when the attack happened, in a rented house in Roubaix.

A medical expert quoted by France Info said the girl had 45 facial lesions, 150 on her hands and 30 on her feet.

... Reports say rubbish bins nearby were overflowing.

The father, who has two other children, said he found his paraplegic daughter Samantha "drenched in blood" in her bed last Saturday. ...

"There was blood coming from her ears - I was terrified that she might have had a brain haemorrhage," he said, quoted by the local newspaper Courrier-Picard.

Some of her fingertips were bitten off and surgeons cannot repair them, he said. ...

The hospital has run checks on Samantha for possible infections, including rabies. The rabies test was negative.

Such attacks on humans are rare, though hungry rats do sometimes feed on corpses.

SOURCE: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41198770

 

[RaM]

Bloody hell don't fancy that it must have been horrific.
This cat must have been some ratter to have a water
trough to remember it by

 

[GNC]

I saw a rat last night! It ran across the road in the countryside.

 

[GingerTabby]

I am not pleased to report that I saw one in broad daylight last week near my home. It sauntered across the street and passed about three metres in front me on the pavement before meandering into a dormant garden. I watched it as it sniffed the soil and then wandered into a nearby alley. Another passerby also spotted it and exclaimed "Isn't that cute!" No it bloody isn't, I said to myself, but grunted some inane pleasantry in reply. I suspect the rat was an adolescent, given its size.

Construction of a light rail system has been going on in my city for over a year and one of the lines is being built in my neighbourhood in the city centre. Stories of an increase in the local rodent population have been circulating since the construction began. No doubt the rodents have been displaced by the work and are looking for other homes. On the up side, the increase in the number of rodents has led to an increase in the owl population in a local park. Since it was daylight, however, none was at hand to deal with the little beggar in my street.

Some friends who used to live in the burbs had a problem with mice in their basement during the autumn. Presumably the mice were seeking to install themselves in the warmth of a house before the winter set in. I used to jokingly refer to my friends' basement as the Land of Rodentia. Now it seems the same label could be applied to my own neighbourhood.

 

[MetroGnome]

When I was six or so we moved to a homestead in the rural areas. We initially rented an old farmhouse, and when we got there the place was filled with rats. I well remember hearing them running on the ceiling at night; it sounded like herds of cattle were having a party up there.

But we also had a Siamese cat. Suffice it to say, the rat problem disappeared within a few weeks.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

Several years ago, we went to the churchyard in rural North Yorkshire, where my mum is buried. I grew up a few metres from this same churchyard, lived there 20 years and never saw anything rat-related (presumably because in the 60s and 70s they still employed a sexton, or something, to take care of the graveyard).

The churchyard is on a very steep hill and surrounded by a 12 foot high stone wall so it wasn't til we started up the hill that we saw a sea of rats, literally swarming, around a certain part of the graveyard (where the newest burials are). I remember saying to my husband I wouldn't want to be buried there - you probably get eaten by rats... If I'd just buried a relative there, I'd have been very disturbed and upset. As it was we just stood and watched them seethe for a while. I did think of ringing the vicar to tell him to do summat about it but promptly forgot and anyway he is a bit of a dick.

But yes, boiling seas of rats are a thing. They didn't cover the whole churchyard (they couldn't have - it is the biggest one I know, attached to a church - almost the size of some municipal graveyards). But I'd have said there were a couple of hundred of em. Luckily for her, my mum is buried right the other end but my grandparents are around that part of the graveyard and probably were being carried away in the rats' mouths, as they were in the past year or two, grubbed up for more recent tenants (They died in 1939 and the mid 1950s, respectively, but in an unmarked grave so I reckon the vicar thought that part of the churchyard was Fair Game).

My niece was getting wed there around that time and I did wonder if the rats might turn up in the background of the picturesque wedding shots but no sign of them, on that day. That vicar skins you for nearly £1000 for a cursory half hour wedding service, (25 minutes of which was him panhandling the punters for money) so you'd think he'd have a vested interest in rat destruction.

 

[lordmongrove]

Rats gobble up masses of dope (according to police) https://hightimes.com/news/police-blame-rats-missing-kilos-weed/

 

[lordmongrove]

https://uk.yahoo.com/news/plague-ra...g-car-cables-take-english-town-114228427.html

Giant rat invasion. Where's Tom Baker when you need him.

 

[Swifty]

https://uk.yahoo.com/news/plague-ra...g-car-cables-take-english-town-114228427.html

Giant rat invasion. Where's Tom Baker when you need him.

I saw one the size of a cat once in Staffordshire .. that was scary but it ran off.

 

[ramonmercado]

I saw one the size of a cat once in Staffordshire .. that was scary but it ran off.

You're scarier than a giant rat, frightened it off!

 

[escargot]

We saw a huge rat running along the canal near Brum. In my imagination it has now grown to the size of a small donkey.

 

[ramonmercado]

Some noteworthy rats.

Technicians who arrived to fix a malfunctioning cash machine in the Indian state of Assam got a shock when they opened it up.

Notes worth more than 1.2m rupees (£13,300; $17,600) had been shredded - and the suspected culprits are rats.

Police said the rodents probably entered the machine through a hole for wiring, the Hindustan Times reported.

Pictures of the chewed cash at the State Bank of India branch in Tinsukia district were widely shared on Twitter.

One shows a dead rodent lying in the debris.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44539862

 

[Tribble]

Rodents of Unusual Size spotted in Sundsvall, Sweden :

"There aren't the normal rats you see in the forest. They're as big as cats," Benny Sagmo from the city planning office told TT.

https://www.thelocal.se/20180621/northern-sweden-rats-sundsvall

 

[Jim]

We lived by a nasty creek when young, here I spotted the odd sewer rat (likely Norway Rats) that was nearly the size of a small adult cat. The attached article discusses some rather larger rats.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160407-the-worlds-largest-rats-are-the-size-of-small-dogs

 

[ramonmercado]

Well she did order ratatouille.

A restaurant chain in China lost $190m (£145m) in market value after images of a pregnant woman finding a dead rat in her meal were uploaded on the internet.

Restaurant Xiabu Xiabu’s stock “hit its lowest level in almost a year, after photos of the dead rat being fished out of the broth with a pair of chopsticks quickly spread online”, says the BBC.

In all, the discovery of the rat “had knocked about $190 million off the market value of the business, which is publicly traded in Hong Kong”, reports The New York Times.

Xiabu Xiabu specialises in hot pot, “traditionally a large family meal where various meats, vegetables and other ingredients are cooked at the table by diners in a giant pot of bubbling soup and consumed immediately”, says The Daily Telegraph.

According to the Asia One news website, the woman who found the dead rat in her hot pot had already taken a few mouthfuls.

http://www.theweek.co.uk/96462/rat-...letter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter
https://twitter.com/SCMPNews/status/1039147731564941312

 

[escargot]

Well she did order ratatouille.

A restaurant chain in China lost $190m (£145m) in market value after images of a pregnant woman finding a dead rat in her meal were uploaded on the internet.

Restaurant Xiabu Xiabu’s stock “hit its lowest level in almost a year, after photos of the dead rat being fished out of the broth with a pair of chopsticks quickly spread online”, says the BBC.

In all, the discovery of the rat “had knocked about $190 million off the market value of the business, which is publicly traded in Hong Kong”, reports The New York Times.

Xiabu Xiabu specialises in hot pot, “traditionally a large family meal where various meats, vegetables and other ingredients are cooked at the table by diners in a giant pot of bubbling soup and consumed immediately”, says The Daily Telegraph.

According to the Asia One news website, the woman who found the dead rat in her hot pot had already taken a few mouthfuls.

http://www.theweek.co.uk/96462/rat-...letter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

Sounds like industrial sabotage.

 

[Cochise]

I'm going to have to start murdering rats. I hate to do it, I can live with the odd one, but they are getting large and bold and humane methods have not worked. Those ultrasonic things are useless.

 

[Coal]

I'm going to have to start murdering rats. I hate to do it, I can live with the odd one, but they are getting large and bold and humane methods have not worked. Those ultrasonic things are useless.

Air rifle. Candle lamp. Sweetcorn.

 

[ramonmercado]

I'm going to have to start murdering rats. I hate to do it, I can live with the odd one, but they are getting large and bold and humane methods have not worked. Those ultrasonic things are useless.

Get Max to shoot them for you. He'll kill, skin and eat them before breakfast!