9 ms·
How rats became an inescapable part of city living
- neonate 8y agohttps://outline.com/sPzj3G https://outline.com/sPzj3G
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago“It is the tail,” says Laurinda Williams, who breeds rats on Long Island and sells them as pets. “If it weren’t for the tail, everyone would have rats.” Definitely true. The other thing about rat size... man IDK. I was in Panang Malaysia and saw a dead rat in a drain that blew my mind it was so large. It was no doubt in my mind over 2lbs. It was nasiating to see, and I’ve seen rats in DC, NYC, Paris. The articles claim of 1lb 13oz might be correct but it sure seems they must be extremely light for their size.
- stevekemp 8y agoBack when I was a student I kept a couple as pets, as they were much more interesting than gerbils, mice, and hamsters. (That's about the size of pets we had space for.) I do recall a few people were weirded out by their tails, but I never really understood it. I'd be happy to keep rats again, they're intelligent enough to do interesting things, and learn from their environment. They can also respond to simple verbal commands - recognizing their names - and they're not at all prone to biting children, which is a good thing!
- InitialLastName 8y agoSeconded; I had a pair of rats until recently, and they made awesome pets: affectionate, smart enough to play with, and with distinct personalities while being pretty low maintenance (and willing to eat most of our food scraps). If my partner hadn't developed a skin allergy to them (which made handling them suck for her) we would for sure have acquired more when ours died. Edit: in retrospect, I'm pretty sure that quote is from the breeder we used! She's doing hamsters and rabbits now as well.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI had some for a while too. I agree that they are really nice animals and a lot of fun but I also agree that the tails are a little freaky. I still have holes in some bed sheets they chewed in :)
- gianteu 8y agoWhat stops us from creating a genetically modified tailess rat.
- V-2 8y ago> “It is the tail,” says Laurinda Williams, who breeds rats on Long Island and sells them as pets. “If it weren’t for the tail, everyone would have rats.” > Definitely true. Is it, though? ;) There are other rodents with much more pleasant tails, and while I myself had a polecat-ferret when I was a kid, awesome pet, it sure as hell wasn't true everyone had them.
- durge 8y agoWas it bloated? Things bloat when they die.
- valarauko 8y agoSounds like you saw the Greater Bandicoot Rat in Malaysia. Scary mofos.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoI think I took a photo but only to show someone, probably deleted after that because I had trouble with it. AMAZING food on that island, but then I kept thinking about these beasts running around at night. Didn't ruin the food for me, but I was happy to not think about it. Those are gnarly rats!
- calciphus 8y agoIt's a little odd that the second paragraph of the article cites how rats "may have transmitted plague" and then links to an article titled "Maybe Rats Aren't to Blame for the Black Death". Why?
- imgabe 8y agoThe "common knowledge" is that rats (or their fleas) transmitted the plague. New research suggests this might not be the case.
- joecool1029 8y agoHere is a link to that research: http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1715640115 http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1715640115
- tomjakubowski 8y agoI think both phrases do a good enough job expressing the uncertainty of the rat's culpability in the black death: "X may have Y" and "maybe X didn't Y" are two sides of the same coin.
- mirimir 8y agoLittle known fact: rats, mice and pigs are our closest relatives, beyond primates. Which is why we test stuff on mice. And use pigs in developing medical devices.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoThis can't actually be true, because rats and pigs are not closely related to each other. Pigs are more closely related to whales than they are to rats, which means that if (say) we were more closely related to pigs than to rats, we would also be more closely related to whales than to rats. In terms of taxonomy, primates are an order of mammals. It follows immediately that humans are equally closely related to all non-primate mammals. (That's not true either, as you can see by e.g. the designation of marsupials as an "infraclass", a level between class and order, but it's the first approximation to reality.)
- mirimir 8y agoI'm sure of it for rodents. Primates and rodents are "supraprimates".[0] Maybe I'm wrong about pigs, though. 0) http://www.els.net/WileyCDA/ElsArticle/refId-a0005306.html http://www.els.net/WileyCDA/ElsArticle/refId-a0005306.html [see Images tab]
- klodolph 8y agoYou say "that's not true either", but really, it was never true in the first place. Traditional taxonomy is bad at determining how related species are. If you want that, you look for evidences of common ancestors, or do DNA analysis. I tried digging through Wikipedia articles on taxonomy, but it seems to be a bit of a mess, with different articles in the hierarchy using different, incompatible sources. It looks like rodents and primates are both members of clade Euarchontoglires, with common ancestors 85-95 mya. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euarchontoglires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euarchontoglires Clade Laurasiatheria is a sibling containing pigs, cats, whales, bats, and many others. Common ancestor with primates is listed as ~80-100 mya (yes, this number doesn't match the other one).
- 8y ago
- geowwy 8y ago> From Seattle to Buenos Aires, urban rat populations are rising—as much as 15 > to 20 percent in the past decade, according to one expert. Charismatic > animals like elephants, polar bears, and lions are all in decline, yet > inside our cities, we find it hard even with extraordinary efforts to keep > rat populations in check. One big reason for that is the removal of free-roaming cats and dogs from human habitats. Free roaming cats and dogs have been a part of our society for as long as we've been forming cities, we only recently decided to remove them. Of course it's going to have the knock on effects we're now starting to see, * vermin * food waste * wild animals venturing into cities * etc.
- hycaria 8y agoThey went into trash nowadays. Also cats preying on birds and decimating them. There's no ideal solution.
- hobs 8y agoBecause human cities didnt have gigantic midden piles before? There's no change there.
- escapecharacter 8y agoCan we bring back free-roaming cats and dogs then?
- dajohnson89 8y agoCats & dogs can be fatal disease vectors (rabies).
- dymk 8y agoAnd cats destroy local bird and wildlife populations. They don’t discriminate on what they hunt.
- LoSboccacc 8y agowell, _something_ has to be there, right? there's a lot of energy floating down there in the urban substrata, from sewage and trash going upward, so a food chain naturally emerges as opportunistic omnivores break the ground with predators following suite.
- gnulinux 8y agoI grew up in Istanbul -- the cat city -- where free roaming cats are everywhere and have never seen a mouse in my life. I thought "mice in city" was a Medieval thing. Until I moved to Bay Area... And then I moved to Boston... Turns out there are mice all over the cities in US. EDIT: Also recently I learned I'm allergic to mice. This went undiagnosed for 22 years until I moved into Boston.
- eknkc 8y agoTurkish here, can confirm. 34 years old, never once seen a rat in a city setting, living in the capital, Ankara.
- gnulinux 8y agoSeriously, when I first moved into my new house in Boston, two months in, I saw a little mouse in my kitchen and I literally lost my shit. I've never even imagined seeing a freaking mouse in my living space. My roomies were like "ooh don't worry, that's normal. We can just call the exterminator tomorrow and it'll be all good." Apparently this is a totally normal thing in large cities in the East Coast like New York or Boston. Back in Bay Area it was normal to see mice or racoons in the streets, but I never even considered the possibility of seeing one inside my house. It's interesting how tiny cultural differences (having cats in the city) can cause you to make such assumptions about human living conditions. Before moving to US, I would consider seeing mice an alarming and totally abnormal situation. It's like seeing a snake, or scorpion, or bat in your house.
- ams6110 8y agoI live in the country. I get mice in the house every winter. They can get in through the smallest crevice and they are attracted to the warmth. Traps baited with peanut butter are effective. Mice are quite dumb.
- sevensor 8y agoWhen I lived in Texas, my co-workers who lived in the countryside would complain about scorpions. Scorpions liked one co-worker's closets especially, so she always had to shake out her clothes before getting dressed.
- garyscary 8y agoI guess we’re lucky in Alberta to not have rats
- garyscary 8y agoGuess we’re lucky not to have rats here in Alberta.
- ceejayoz 8y agoI had no idea! Fascinating. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-stirring-story-of-how-alberta-became-the-first-place-in-the-world-to-banish-the-rat https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-stirring-story-of-h...
- jpmattia 8y ago> So the extermination industry uses anticoagulants, or blood thinners, which don’t affect rats for hours and don’t kill them for several days. The rats die slowly from internal bleeding. Corrigan hates to inflict such a death, but he fears outbreaks of disease. So he continues to lend his expertise to clients. This is incredibly short-sighted thinking: Even if we ignore the horrible death it inflicts, what happens to the anti-coagulants after the rat dies? Here's one example at the top of the page: https://www.mountainlion.org/actionalerts/043014CAab2657/043014CAab2657.asp https://www.mountainlion.org/actionalerts/043014CAab2657/043... It's not like these poisons hit a precise target and magically evaporate: They remain in the environment, and then what goes around comes around.
- KangLi 8y agoI don't agree with the idea that rats size is exaggerated in NYC. I have seen some at a building under construction at night that left me perplexed. A rat on steroids I'd say, walking like a pitbull..