The Actual Death of Rats

[akirlu]

Contrary to whatever you may have heard from Terry Pratchett, the Death of Rats is fluffy, green-eyed, unkempt, with black-and-mahogany guard hairs and a fuzzy, grayish undercoat. The Death of Rats lives with me.

Tinka was put out at being left home alone all weekend. She's been dubious about the cat tuna ever since we got home, and around midnight last night I opened the front door in response to plaintive kitty wails to find a glossy, medium-sized rat -- easily a third to half of Tinka's own mass -- laid out neatly on the welcome mat, its eyes still dewy and clear, like very fresh fish.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that Tink continues to be a good ratter. The less good news is that there are rats to be had. I really must have a chat with the rental office about more frequent garbage collection.

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Some caution may be in order. Upon receiving a rat complaint, your landlord may attack the problem by setting out rodent bait. As long as neighborhood cats and dogs just kill the sickly rodents there may be no problem. If they eat them, and the bait contained enough coumarin or certain other commonly-used poisons, there could be some sick or dead pets. Some rodent bait poisons don't move significantly up the food-chain (ipecac & similar vomifuges are fatal to rats but only annoying to animals that are capable of vomiting) and I suspect Seattle may have Regulations in place, but it still might be a good idea to keep a sharp eye on any local Exterminator activity.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Good warnings all. I must admit, I don't so much want them to treat it as a rodent problem as a garbage problem. Ever since they switched to a new garbage company the dumpsters are too small, even when the complex isn't close to capacity, which these days it is. So every single week you have several days when the garbage is piled up or strewn around the dumpsters, and the crows get into it and strew it more broadly, leaving bones and crusts all over the place. The crew do a pretty good job policing that stuff up when they pick up the trash, but by then it's been lying around for several days. What we really need are bigger dumpsters, more dumpsters, or more frequent pickups.

So, say you wouldn't happen to know what LA radio stations were active in the early 1950s, would you? Or what typical radio programs would have been on Christmas Eve, circa 1952?