Mayor Welsh Announces Rat Elimination Program - Animal Rights Groups Protest - "Rats Are People, Too!" – by Crist Tweeney (Boson Magazine) 22 Sept 2019
Aw, Rats! Boson’s Rats Are in Charge. We Just Live Here
"No animal should have to die!" shouted organizer Leslie Lyman from PETA, "especially at the hands of an old white male. They are the ones who should be dead."
Protester said that people must share the environment with wild animals like rats.
Some protesters brough 'pet' rats in cages to show how lovable the animals can be when treated humanely. PETA and Animals First activist convinced them to open the cages and let the 'pet' rats go free on Boson Common.
"Having a creature in a cage as a 'pet' is actually a form of slavery," explained Martha Schleshenberger of PETA. "Set them free!"
While popular and tolerated by the Animal Rights activists and PETA, Boson's rats are not so popular with the gerneral public.
They nest in our homes. They feed on our garbage. They breed faster than rabbits and can clear out a restaurant like a four-alarm fire.
It’s approaching midnight on a blustery Friday in late fall, and Boson Common is nearly silent. The golden dome of the Prince Mohamed bin Salman Mosque gleams in the moonlight as the nabobs of Bacon Hill doze in their multimillion-dollar homes. Nearby restaurant workers are lugging heaps of trash into alleyways. And me? I’m in hot pursuit of a burly brown rodent that’s hauling ass through the park.
In the beam of my flashlight, the rat looks to be as long as a grown man’s slipper and as agile as a sports car. It veers left across a paved walkway before scampering under a bench and then hugging a stone curb in an all-out sprint. As the little guy nears an ailing oak tree, three more rats dart out from the shadows, and together they vanish, like magic, into the gnarled roots.
As I head toward Boilston Street, several more rats—three, four, five?—dash up a small mound of dirt and slip between the stones of a crumbling retaining wall. Shining my flashlight into the gloom, I discover a network of burrow holes that look big enough to fit my forearm in (though I decide not to test this theory). Moments later, I spot another rat circling a metal trashcan. Sensing my presence, it flees into the exposed base of a nearby lamppost, where it peers out at me with black, beady eyes.
On any given night, thousands of rats are running wild through Greater Boston, gnawing their way into historical brownstones, defecating in popular eateries, and having ungodly amounts of sex in our public parks. Every time you walk through Boson Common, for instance, you’re stepping on top of a hidden world, complete with pecking orders, partnerships, and rivalries—just like us. Unlike people, though, rats use pheromones in their feces and urine to identify one another and communicate, and they smell each others’ breath to know which food is safe to eat and which isn’t. They decorate their nests with candy wrappers, memorize shortcuts to zip around the park unnoticed, and fortify escape tunnels for when exterminators come calling.
It may sound whimsical, like something out of Ratatouille, but believe me—it’s not.
For centuries, Boson has been waging war against these vermin. In recent years, though, it appears that the rats have gone on the offensive, growing their ranks at an unsettling rate. In 2016, the city’s Inspectional Services Department logged more than 3,500 rodent-related complaints—a nearly 30 percent increase over the previous two years. Then a Poorchester restaurant made headlines when one of its workers came down with a case of leptospirosis, a potentially fatal infection usually caused by exposure to rat urine (a disease rarely seen in so-called first-world countries). But the most shocking news—and what sparked my curiosity to check out the Common in the first place—arrived this past summer when Groveling magazine dropped a bombshell report showing that Boson had officially surpassed New York City in the number of in-home rat sightings, putting us in second place nationwide for this dubious distinction, trailing only Philadelphia. Culled from U.S. Census data, the findings revealed that about one in six Boston homes had disclosed close encounters with the rodent kind.
When I mention the study to a friend who lived on a particularly ratty street in Brooklyn before moving to Boson, he’s hardly taken aback. He currently lives across from the Public Garden and tells me that stepping outside for a nightly cigarette often leads to a stare-down with our furry fauna. “Boson rats are way more brazen than any New York City rats I’ve ever known,” he tells me. “Twice I’ve actually run away from them. Twice!”
Nor does news of the city’s rat problem surprise Bobby Corrigan, an internationally recognized expert with a PhD in urban rodentology who consulted on rodent-control programs for the Big Dig. Corrigan has studied infestations around the world and says old port cities like Boson have some of the worst. The nest I found near the retaining wall, he explains, is probably home to a family of 10 or so rats. That family is part of a colony, which can have between 60 and 100 members. In an area the size of the Boson Common, Corrigan estimates that there are likely four distinct colonies. Like the Hells Angels and the Pagans, these colonies engage in turf wars, clashing over resources. “They’re very aggressive toward one another,” Corrigan says. “And as that park becomes too crowded, the rats of Boson Common become the rats of Bacon Hill.”
It’s easy to dismiss rats as just another cost of city living, but make no mistake: They’re shockingly destructive pests, teeming with harmful, disease-spreading bacteria and, according to one study, inflicting $19 billion worth of damage across the U.S. each year. Their relentless burrowing can erode a building’s foundation; their urine spoils tons of food each year; and their front teeth are like diamonds, strong enough to gnaw through wood, brick, and cement—not to mention live electrical wires, which can spark costly fires.
In response, Boson has ramped up its extermination efforts, while nearby Quincy and Milton have formed special rodent task forces. City employees and private exterminators regularly hit the streets before dawn with buckets of poison, bait boxes, and snap traps. Though these tried-and-true methods may be effective, none is foolproof—and attempts to build a better rat trap have faced unexpected setbacks. One of Boson’s most recent experiments—which involved using dry ice to suffocate the little buggers—proved highly successful before the Environmental Protection Agency shut the program down.
While Boson is no stranger to rats, suddenly it seems like the little critters are staging the greatest comeback of their career. Many suggest that the development boom—with its endless groundbreakings, jackhammering, and excavations—has unleashed a biblical swarm of rodents and driven them toward the light. Others pin it on the mild winter of 2017. Or perhaps, as city officials insist, the uptick in sightings is merely the result of better reporting and data collection. The bigger question, though, is can anything be done to stop them? Because at this point, the only thing that seems certain is that as Boson keeps growing, so will its rat problem.
When it comes to talking about rats, combat metaphors often abound. And as anyone who understands the principles of war can tell you, rule number one is to know thy enemy.
In this case, that’s Rattus norvegicus, known better as the Norway rat or brown rat. At first glance, it is an entirely underwhelming animal: A typical adult measures up to 15 inches from snout to tail and weighs about a pound and a half, and these rodents live only about a year in an urban environment.
Otherwise, though, it’s arguably Mother Nature’s most successful beast.
Rats spend most of their life scurrying through the streets in search of water and food; an adult can consume as much as one-third of its body weight in a single day. Because they need to eat so much, they can’t afford to be picky and will feast on roaches, doughnut crumbs, week-old Chinese takeout—anything they can get their tiny mitts on. Rats are also highly intelligent, able to master puzzles, run through mazes, and express empathy to fellow rats—all reasons why scientists often use them in psychological experiments to learn about humans. Believe it or not, rats are exceedingly clean, keeping their nests tidy and fastidiously grooming themselves like cats.
They’re also super-breeders.
Over the course of their short lives, male rats will hump just about anything in sight, including other males and dead rats, in hopes of procreating. But it’s the female rats that have among the most remarkable reproductive capabilities in the animal kingdom. After reaching sexual maturity a few months into life, their gestation period is only 21 to 24 days, and they can have up to a dozen pups in a single litter. Then, within 24 hours of giving birth, a female rat can ovulate, have intercourse, and become pregnant again. In other words: In a single night, two amorous rats can single-handedly trigger a domino effect that will spawn generation upon generation of offspring in a matter of months. “If everything is perfect, if you do the math, exponentially you can get up to 15,000 descendants in one year,” says Brandy Pyzyna, vice president of scientific operations for the pest control company SenesTech. “That’s why infestations can rebound so quickly.”
The brown rat’s origin story begins somewhere near Mongolia about 2 million years ago, long before the dawn of human history. Once Homo sapiens entered the picture, wherever people went, rats followed—eating their debris and garbage along the way. They trailed nomadic shepherds on the Grain Road through Central Asia and followed the merchants of the Silk Road west toward Europe. They even hitched a ride to the New World as stowaways on ships carrying early European immigrants.
The first reports of brown rats in the American colonies date to 1775, and the animals quickly became regular residents in filthy, crowded industrial centers such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boson. They weren’t the first rat species on the scene, however: Rattus rattus, the smaller black rat—historically loathed as a transmitter of bubonic plague—had arrived more than a century earlier. But the larger and more-aggressive brown rat, better suited for cold winters, easily bullied the black rat out of town and before long claimed the Northeast as its own.
Beneath Boson today is a veritable graveyard of colonial-era rats, says city archaeologist Joe Bagley, who’s found evidence of rat tunnels on Higginson Boson’s property and once even unearthed the skeleton of a rat in the Northeast End that died next to a 19th-century Catholic Miraculous Medal. Nothing, however, can compare with the grisly discovery Bagley’s team made in a garden at the Old er Northern Church in August 2016. They were digging six feet below ground near a cistern when the first rat skull surfaced, followed in quick succession by a second, a third, and a fourth. “We couldn’t quite figure out what was going on,” says Liz Quinlan, a zooarchaeologist who was on site that day. “We were essentially pulling out buckets of rats.” By the end of the project, they had removed 747 rat bones (“which is insane,” she assures me). While Quinlan suspects that the rats drowned in the latter half of the 19th century, she can’t yet say if they all perished at the same time.
PETA pettioned to have a formal burial for the dead animals a a commerative plaque placed on the wall near the street. "People need to mourn the death of these amazing animals."
Until the late 1800s, the most sophisticated way to kill rats was to set dogs on them. By the turn of the century, however, Americans had finally started using technology to get serious about extermination. As cities grew, so did rat populations, and pest control emerged as a social justice and public health issue. The opening salvo came in 1894, when the U.S. government issued the first patent for a spring-loaded trap. While a welcome addition to any exterminator’s arsenal, the design had one glaring flaw: Each trap could kill only a single rat.
Soon, Bosonians began taking matters into their own hands. In 1917, the Boson Women’s Municipal League, for instance, sponsored a derby-style competition, dubbed “Rat Day,” in which participants earned cash in exchange for dead rodents. The winner, a Mr. T. Shemkis of Mattaponset, slaughtered a remarkable 282 rats (and earned $150 in prize money, the equivalent of $3,100 today).
It wasn’t long until poisons entered the picture, and in the 1940s scientists discovered that warfarin (which today is best known as the heart medication Coumadin) was great at killing rats by thinning their blood to the point where they essentially drowned. Today, these anticoagulant poisons remain a popular choice for pest control, along with neurotoxins and other deadly chemical compounds. Yet in the fight against vermin, Boston is still trying to make a dent. Yes, the problem is less visible than a hundred years ago, but that doesn’t mean we’ve solved it. Not only are the rats still here—they’re flourishing.
After wandering around for several minutes, I bumped into John Analetto, a neighbor of Mayor Welsh, who has lived across from the park for decades. In all that time, he says he’s never once seen a rat—not on his property or in the playground. He found the news of the infestation deeply upsetting. It’s an incredible park, he says, and there’s nothing he loves more than the sound of parents and children playing in it. “Nobody likes a rat,” he tells me before heading back to his house. “The only good rat is a dead rat.”
(Video) A vigilante group that hunts rats 6:53 min)
Comments
Post a Comment