BMEWS
 
Sarah Palin is the reason compasses point North.

calendar   Saturday - October 04, 2008

Britain’s rat infestation, growing at an alarming rate.  (wonder if they counted the MIL in this)

HEY…
Not a joke at all.  I had no idea it was like this, although we did see a family of them two years ago.
In fact, I saw one calmly saunter across our kitchen floor once, again it was two years ago.  But what I hear in the walls on a cold night might be them.
Mice for certain and maybe squirrels too.  No, not funny.

I can see Vilmar reading this and saying, Ha. Didn’t I tell ya they were DOOMED?

A SINGLE PAIR CAN PRODUCE 15,000 OFFSPRING IN A YEAR.

Damn, that’s close to a muslim record. 

It’s late, last post for the evening. Have a nice wkend all.
jdp


BRITAIN’S RAT INFESTATION

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 04/10/2008
Page 1 of 3

Britain’s rat population is growing at a startling rate thanks to warmer, wetter weather and our increasingly slovenly refuse habits. To make matters worse, the animals are becoming immune to our poisons - and they appear to be laughing at us. Will Storr goes on patrol with the pest police

Steve Davies removes the heavy iron manhole cover and stands back. ‘It’s not a pretty world down there,’ says the burly Yorkshireman, dressed in the unmistakable blood-red uniform of the Rentokil man. As on every other working day, he has come to commit maximum rodent slaughter with his bags of tainted grain, which causes the animals to bleed internally until they die.

image

It is four o’clock on a Wednesday morning on the outskirts of Leeds and we have been directed to this spot with the aid of a large, black-and-white map with sewer lines and manholes marked on it. There are also icons depicting large black rats. Lots of them. These mark the locations of known sewer infestations.

Davies’s job is called ‘sewer baiting’ and, on behalf of Yorkshire Water, he and Rentokil’s other agents of massacre go out - just as men like them have done since Victorian times - pulling up manhole covers, tying bags of Fentrol, an anticoagulant poison, to long lengths of string and laying them on the paths of the ‘foul lines’ that make up a small part of the subterranean world that thrives beneath our cities: a trickling, stinking, scuttling labyrinth of vast tunnels and abandoned subways. (Very few local authorities still bait their sewers, claiming it is too expensive - the people of Yorkshire are lucky to have men such as Davies.)

He pulls up a string he left last week. The bag attached to it is empty, having been ravaged by a brown rat. ‘There’s a lot of things down there that will eat anything,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen very, very strange frogs. Very bright. I don’t know if they’re mutations or what.’

What do the rats eat, I ask.

‘I wouldn’t like to go into detail,’ he says. ‘It’s a sewer. What do you think?’ My toes squeeze involuntarily. Almost everything I have discovered about rats has caused a similar sensation - a mixture of disgust and astonishment.

Rats can gnaw through concrete and metal, and are incapable of vomiting; they have sex roughly 20 times a day; male rats sometimes mate until their partner dies of exhaustion; a single pair can produce 15,000 offspring a year; it is thought that there are between 60 and 80 million of them in Britain, an increase of 39 per cent since 2000; every day four million are born worldwide; the African variety can grow to 3ft long; seven per cent of house fires in Britain are caused by rats biting through electric cables; they are the only animal that the SAS are banned from eating; the Taiwanese drown and then eat them - poached, fried, grilled or baked - especially savouring the liver; in 2005 they brought down the entire traffic light system at Marble Arch in London; a state of emergency was declared in Peru last year after a heatwave prompted record numbers of rat litters; up to five per cent of food produced worldwide is lost to rodents; they eat 10 per cent of their bodyweight every day; they dislike peaches, but like dog faeces; their collective noun is a ‘mischief’; they have a bite pressure of 7,000lb per square inch; if they weren’t being constantly worn, their incisors would grow 5in per year and are as strong as steel; they can run faster than humans and jump up to 6ft; 50,000 people a year are bitten by rats worldwide; they can collapse their own skeletons and crawl through holes as narrow as three-quarters of an inch; they are cannibals and, when one feeds on the another, it opens up the head and starts with the brain. And they can ‘laugh’: research recently revealed that they emit a ‘high chirruping sound’ when amused or tickled.

Davies has one piece of good news: we are unlikely to be confronted by any rats this morning. Rats are nocturnal, and daylight sightings by pest control officers are rare (’the public see them more often than we do,’ he says). But almost nothing else I have heard today has been good. Leeds councillors have warned of a ‘plague of super rats’ - rapidly evolving, stronger, more intelligent and longer-living - and Colin Smith, Rentokil’s technical services manager, who is responsible for de-ratting major supermarket chains, has told me his company saw a 26 per cent increase in rat calls between 2006 and 2007.

What is more, the rodents - which are evolving at a rate three times faster than humans - are developing immunity to all our best poisons. Considering that they carry roughly 70 diseases (including salmonella, cholera, typhus and the potentially fatal Weil’s disease, or leptospirosis, which almost did for a Rentokil area manager not long ago), and that they are thought to have been responsible, globally, for 10 million deaths in the 20th century, it is surprising that the war against the rat doesn’t weigh more heavily on our consciousness, though the creature has long since burrowed into our collective nightmares.

A long article but worth the reading. The rest of the article can be found here.

http://tinyurl.com/4qqg5c


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Posted by Drew458   United Kingdom  on 10/04/2008 at 01:20 PM   
Filed Under: • Scary StuffUK •  
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