betacorpo.net>>

6/24/03:

Bicho do mato

Apparently, Chicago's rat population consists solely of the Norway Rat [slithy popups] and the best way for cities to deal with them is to cut off their food supply until they eat each other.

I spent the last late Sunday night hours with a couple of friends sipping summer ales on the back porch of my apartment that extends out into an overgrown backyard. I'm almost up to three years of having lived in this place, and I've before only seen the occasional furry black oval scurry past a snow-covered street or cross the alleys late at night. That night we were out there, the weeds and bushes and trees growing throughout the 1/4 acre out back were all rustling and snapping, three or four dozen little shadows scattering about the pink lights from the alley, nails scratching their way up garbage cans and wooden fences, and every minute or so a scream from one little beast attacking the other.

The last few days have been the first of the 80-degree weather. The old building next door, with the old abandoned storefront, is coming down. A dozen others up the street are in some stage of being converted into those giant pink townhouses that are always built seven or eight feet taller than the older adjacent buildings, not to add a floor, nor design more space, and certainly against the aesthetic harmony of the rows of buildings along the block.

Filmmaker Jim Felter, who spent two years producing the documentary Rats on Washington DC's rat problems, describes rats as not themselves the problem, but "a symptom of the real problem, which is our culture's excessive wastefulness. Rats are one of the major predicaments that result from our consumer-driven, waste-intensive society."

posted by jeremy @ 1:57 PM