💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~stack › gemlog › 2022-04-07.rat.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 12:31:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-04-28)
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NYC is lousy has always had rats, like any other city. Back in the day, residential trash was placed into metal cans, with metal lids. Rats had to get by on whatever they could get in the basements of restaurants, sewers, and subway tunnels. Occasionally you would see a rat, but it was not that often.
As consumerism escalated, the metal cans were just too small, so trash started piling up in large black bags, stacked several bags high, especially around buildings. And with the pandemic, the piles of boxes, packing material and junk got even bigger.
Needless to say, rats thrive in such environments. At night, the bags are moving, with dozens of rats scouring the contents. Rats run freely, over your feet, up and down sidewalks, into basements of buildings, and into cars.
Cars present an interesting target for rats. It is easy to get into the engine compartment from the wheel well or up the drivetrain. Once in, there are many safe places - in the wheel wells, behind bumpers. Sometimes they nest there, as many cars in Manhattan are turned on once a week for a few minutes, while the city pretends to clean the streets.
Amazingly, many new cars are wired with soy-based insulation, which rats love. Unchecked, rats will eat the insulation and the car will ignite and burn down.
And so a rat (probably, rats) moved into my car. I found a chicken bone on top of my engine a month ago or so; further investigation turned up piles of rat shit between the cylinders.
This is serious matter: rat piss can get you very sick with parvo or hanta, diseases that make Covid look like a dream. I was still hoping that the rat was just visiting, my car being a quiet place to eat and defacate. So I set out to discourage the rat.
Capsicum spray and mint seemed like a nice, environmentally responsible and humane way to encourage the rat to move on to another car. I thought it worked, but one day I opened the hood and the rat ran across the engine and back into its space in the wheel well. Running the engine smelled awful with rat shit and piss cooking off.
I noticed that when the engines turn on in the morning of street-cleaning, a bunch of rats run down the sidewalks. I imagine they come back into their cars afterwards.
I moved on to a glue trap. These are awful things, but I just don't want to die of hanta. But rats are pretty smart, and had no problem walking around the trap.
My engine compartment is surprisingly large for a tiny car, and a small 'squirrel' tube-shaped trap fit almost perfectly between the radiator and the cylinders. After a few days, I bagged a fat rat.
Was it the only rat in the car? I hope so, although it seems unlikely. I will now fill the obvious spaces with rat-proof urethane foam (as soon as I stop procrastinating), and set the trap again.
This is not really what I signed up for.