Your Experiences with Rats and Cockroaches

(i'm having fun with xposts lately)

Roaches are *faints*

(xpost)(which means latebloomer posted that as I was responding to the previous post)

although i have encountered evidence of rodents as a child i've never seen a live mouse or rat other than I when I livedi n NYC. I have to say that was far less gross than roaches.

Roaches are everyehwere and when you spot them you feel helpless. At least with a rodent you can pretend its you against them. With a bug, you know he repesents the mulitudes and you know you'll never win.

never eat in. that's my key.

Upon my opening the lid of the toilet, out popped a large wet rat, which promptly ran into another room. I could track its whereabouts by the trail of water it left on the floor. As this all happened on the ground floor of the house, I eventually managed to herd the rat out the open door to freedom.

...but I used to live in a house in arizona infested with scorpions and centipedes.

xpost

stence, the 96 million estimate is the highest one I found. Most put it at around 50-60 million, but obviously there's a lot of guesswork involved.

Also, I saw a movie at the New Beverly Cinema in L.A., and a roach fell from the ceiling and landed on the shoulder of the guy in front of me while we were waiting in line for popcorn. He shrieked "Get if off me!" and a fellow ran from behind the counter, slapped the roach away, and stepped on it four times. It wasn't dead yet, so he grabbed a napkin and picked it up and crushed it. That thing was a monster.

What Has Four Legs, a Tail—and Sex Up to 20 Times a Day?
by Jessica Winter
March 30th, 2004 11:00 AM

Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
By Robert Sullivan
Bloomsbury, 242 pp.
$23.95

A few summers back, writer Robert Sullivan decided to closely observe a cagey and misunderstood creature of the wild and account for its culinary preferences, mating habits, and overall psyche. Surprisingly, Sullivan undertook the task mere blocks from the South Street Seaport on a greasy side street with the unlikely moniker Edens Alley, where he monitored the nocturnal transmissions of the dreaded Rattus norvegicus for a solid year. In his daylight hours, the author dug up reams of ratty lore and communed with exterminators—or make that "pest control operators," since, as an expert explained, "the word exterminate suggested a permanency to a customer that was not possible to provide." That's because when they're not inhaling our garbage, rats spend most of their time fornicating: A particularly avid couple can have sex up to 20 times a day and produce 15,000 pups in a single year.

Hugely entertaining and likably discursive, Sullivan's overview brims with such staggering vermin stats while disproving others (all together now: There is not one rat for every human in New York City, but more like one for 36). The dingy nuisance gets to don a coat of many colors through the ages: Here we have rat as popular amusement (a Gangs of New York-era section on Irish-born "rodentary magnet" Kit Burns, who staged dog-vs.-rat fights in the Sportsman's Hall), as outdoorsy adventurer (rats in trees in Greenpoint!), and as social vector—a catalyst for the sanitation workers' and Harlem tenants' strikes of the 1960s. Also, rat as tough motherfucker: hard to kill, nearly impossible to contain, and worthy of our queasy, querulous esteem.

flying rats. that's when we decided not to move to miami.

This was a first.

this morning i found that a juggling bean bag had deflated and all the stuff inside had spilled out. i haven't had time to inspect properly yet but it may well mean we have a furry visitor..

i have no idea how it could have got in. i live on the 1st floor and all the windows are shut most of the time. and the door shouldn't have any gaps for the git.

how likely is it that a whole colony has moved in.. or just the one? i mean, if it's just the one (provided it isn't some crazy scarvanging pregnant rat) then it'd die eventually anyway without breeding new rats right? or are they like ants in the "one comes in and they all move in" kind of thing?

I hope it's not rats maybe it's just something else. God i'll have to actually go LOOK for one too tonight - dreading it.

Do mousetraps actually work? or are they just fun things for people to accidentally step on?

As for Rats, I encountered one in my local pub a month or so ago. I have never been quite so irrationally afraid. But, it was big, wild and near my foot as it ran in (they are knocking down the hospital, so we reckon it ran from there). I didn't like the experience one bit.

(x-post) Lauren - I know that people in a bank down in London had to remove all juggling balls and things, as the mice were forever going for the seed in them.

i'm trying to construct some kind of maze that traps the mice inside so i can keep them as pets.

the "humane" trap worked and caught a mouse.

and so today i came face to face with the corpse of a mouse that's been in the thing for a few days. whiskers and all. :( it probably suffocated.

we now have some of these hi-tech thing that apparently beams out sounds that we can't hear but mice can and hate, so let's see if those work!

caught this one huge rat in an old-school snapping trap once and felt pretty bad for it. didn't really know how to dispose of it either, so I grabbed a paper towel, picked it up by it's 6 in. long tail (neck still caught in trap) and walked across the street to the hospital and threw it in their grass. i hated that hospital, y'see.

Very entertaining.

ARGH. I'm totally embarrassed now.

hope you have better luck with yours than i did with mine, which had absolutely no effect on the mouse army.

I remember one winters day walking on the pavement next to a grassy bank I heard a rustling sound in the long grass. I couldn't see anything but my instinct told me it was a rat of some kind. I quickly threw my hand into the undergrowth (I had gloves on) and grabbed what I could find. To my amazement I pulled out a gruesome looking fat brown rat. I hadn't thought it through though and realised the point of what I'd just done so I just put it back down again.

Don't feel bad Ken, it's you or them.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v515/kenjuggle2/mice.jpg

(remarkable diagrams btw)

http://www.quartzcity.net/~chris/clippings/bloated-rats.jpg

Restaurants aside, it's possible to have NO VERMIN in your apt and you shouldn't have to live with roaches.

Rat in kitchen :'( Small one round the back of the food cupboard. Been eating the cat food. Which explains why the cat's been hanging around the cupboard all the time. And probably also why we had a fly infestation when we moved in a month ago - probably a dead rat under the floorboards or something!

At least the council will get the pest controllers in for free. Dunno how quickly they'll respond to it though.

Cockroaches are horrible. Slightly less disgusting (though slightly larger) are those big "tree roaches" that I used to get in Texas. They will fly at you sometimes if you spray then or go then with a shoe.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/ranch/critters/infestations.php

I have never had rats, but I have had mice. The first time was in Texas, and they were the most ADORABLE white mice, with little pink noses. I didn't want to kill them, but they were eating the cat food as well as chewing insulation and the particle board that the kitchen cabinets were made of. They had to go. The next time I saw a mouse was at a really crappy apartment I lived in in Chicago -- I woke up in the middle of the night to little squeaking and scuttling sounds, and found that my cat was torturing the little guy to death. The mouse was not very cute, though, so I went back to bed and let my cat have his fun. Never saw another mouse.

I did live in a duplex in TX for a while, and I was good friends with my hippie neighbors. They got rats. They wanted the whole house to pitch in for these ultrasonic devices to drive them away, instead of poison or kill them. Call me callous (they did), but I argued that rat traps are cheap, and come one people, they're RATS. And please, you don't care about the rats' precious lives half as much as you don't want to clean up gross dead rats. Suck it up.

Living in the Phoenix area, and early one morning, I didn't have my glasses on and see a little brown stick in the bathroom sink, poking down the drain under the stopper thing, so I grab it and tug on it and it doesn't budge, so I get my face right down there and HOLY SHIT I AM PULLING ON A COCKROACH LEG THAT IS ATTACHED TO A BIGASS TOTALLY ALIVE ROACH AAAAAACCCCCKKKKKK!!!!! I turned the hot water on full blast for an hour I'm sure and scrubbed my fingers raw. Gives me the willies still and that was years ago.

We have the ocassional very small mouse and I'm a huge baby and freak out whenever I see one. A while back, the super put a few glue traps under the stove that we kind of forgot about. So last week my husband was vacumming and I was in the kitchen talking to him. Suddenly he screamed and threw the vac to the floor. The suction attachment thing become stuck on the trap which, when he slid it from beneath the stove, still had a LIVE SQUIRMING mouse stuck to it. I ran out of the room and made him dispose of that little sucker.

Got drunk, left the bar to take a piss outside in Cambridge (MA, USA) (mind you I was drunk), walked around the corner to U-Haul place secluded parking lot, proceeded to piss, squeaking ensues, hair is felt darting past my leg into a shadow.

TAKE THAT MR. SQUEAKERS.

When I first moved to Boston, I lived in the worst apt I've ever seen. It was pretty much a boarded up crackhouse but I was broke and it was $200 for my share. We had HUGE mice problem and some dumb housemates who agreed to watch someone's parrot and proceeded to let the damn bird spill it's food everywhere. More mice. One of these brilliant housemates used the posion pellets and the mice started crawling into weird places to die. While watching TV one day my roommate and I noticed a weird smell which he pinpointed to the chair I was sitting on. I got up, he investigated and yep - I was sitting on the fucking dead mouse. I can't believe I forgot about that one. *shudders*

In my opinion it is worth living as far north as is feasible to get away from these pests. In my old apartment I woke up twice in the morning - still in that half wake / half dream state - to subtly notice a waterbug (june bug, what have you) crawling up my comforter towards my face. This was in Brooklyn.

I was living in Tucson in a strange row house with mainly alcoholics, hookers & ex-cops. I saw some cockroaches in my closet and got some bug spray. When I sprayed a particular hole, literally hundreds of cockroaches came running out. I could not come back inside the apartment for hours. And when I did, of course, there were hundreds of cockroach corpses awaiting me.

There was a big rat/mouse problem in one of my college dorms. I never saw one but my RA turned on his stove only to have a mouse book it up out from underneath a burner holy moley! Rodents aren't that gross, I feel like we have some common ground as mammals and while inconvenient it is only the unpredictability of a rat spotting that really freaks me out. I lose my shit really hard over bugs though and have yet to get over encountering a monster water bug in my grandparents' basement bathroom as a six-year-old. Exterminate em all for realsies

We have a cellar with a crawlspace so I imagine the furry little bastards are nesting in there somewhere. I doubt they'll come out into the house too much with the cats there but a big rat could probably do damage to our kitten if our older cat didn't get to it first. So far we've only seen one small rat but I imagine it's unlikely that's the only one. It's probably a young one which means there might be a big mummy rat somewhere.

I've dealt with rats before, just hope this time one doesn't die in an unreachable place and stink the place out all summer like last time.

When I wasin Tokyo, my mom saw some "brown fluid" and immediately freaked out saying a cockroach had entered the flat. I am happy I didn't see it so I could forever tease her saying "did you have cockah-roach?" she's so scared of'em and also very afraid of being *dirty* (she coudln't ever be considered dirty, she cleans too often...)

Grrr Waltham Forest council are a great help. They can send someone out on the 11th of July. That's 3 fucking weeks away! WTF am I supposed to do in the meantime? Useless cunts.

I guess I'll have to try to find somewhere that sells rat poison or something. Or train my cat to be meaner.

I saw a roach the last time I was in Berlin. I never want to see one again.

I MEAN NEW YORK, not Berlin. all those bloody cities.

All so much alike.

Why did I open this thread?

We had rats living in our attic for awhile. They're gone now. Traps and dogs. Here's one we witnessed our dog Bandit get ahold of:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/113/302806451_91a7daadb0.jpg

I have sent complaint via Waltham Forest website. Feel mildly better, for all the good it will have done. I guess I'll have to try and get the landlord to pay Rentokil or whoever to sort it out.

Our rats are underneath kitchen cabinets attached to the wall so I dunno how we're going to get them out. The cats are too big to get in there are go after them so they just sit around outside the cupboards watching intently.

Yes thankfully our NIMH colony never entered the actual house. I would have died.

I live near a street market, the landlord reckons that's the cause of them - they've had problems with rats before apparently. Naturally we weren't told any of this before we moved in.

I'm spending a lovely day at home recreating the Monty Python mouse organ sketch, with the help of glue traps (all else has failed). I feel like a Bad Person.

Just think of the professional gourmet cooks you're murdering!

well, my office is overrun with roaches

they were coming out occasionally last week and the exterminator sprayed this morning and now they're taking over the first floor offices one room at a time.

http://img.ffffound.com/static-data/assets/6/07f5309275a97d1d7c3bd6a4bb2cb94521e83ab5_m.jpg

Also, I saw a movie at the New Beverly Cinema in L.A., and a roach fell from the ceiling and landed on the shoulder of the guy in front of me while we were waiting in line for popcorn. He shrieked "Get if off me!" and a fellow ran from behind the counter, slapped the roach away, and stepped on it four times. It wasn't dead yet, so he grabbed a napkin and picked it up and crushed it. That thing was a monster.

― Gear! (Gear!), Wednesday, March 17, 2004 7:32 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark