Get a cat or two an you no longer have a problem with rats, mice, roaches, silverfish, anything larger than an ant.
UK scientists couldn't make their predator prey models for Britain work until they factored in housecats who if I remember correctly accounted for 20% of the small animal predation.
If you use concealed automatic litter boxes, cats can be very clean. I just wish we had the Calico Cat Cafe locally.
Occasionally I find a dead roach in the house with a set of very precisely placed bite marks in their dessicated corpses. I know my cats are on the job.
I remember that every restaurant in France when I lived there seemed to have its house cat. Of course, they all accommodated visitors with dogs, too.
Having seen restaurants behind the scenes, I am pretty cynical about this. I do not believe that American restaurants are any cleaner than French ones, nor do I think that allowing cats will lead to outbreaks of disease.
i have an unfortunaite problem, my cat like to brign us live anaimals, i think hes traing the kids how to hunt.
Watch your back, moonglum. 
Is there a risk to the cats of eating rats who may have eaten poison elsewhere?
Is there a risk to the cats of eating rats who may have eaten poison elsewhere?
Generally not. The poisons involved generally have an emetic, and rats cannot throw up, but cats do so with aplomb.
I love my two little merciless killers, Lavi and Tudza.
Tudza is about 15 pounds, all muscle, he's the only cat to have given me bruises (bath), and Lavi is closer to 20 and should weigh 9 lbs.
How do you slim down a cat?
Oh, my.
That KFC/Taco Bell express with the rat infestation was legendary. The reason it freaked so many New Yorkers out was because at some point, half the city's population seemingly went there. It was right outside the exit for the West 4th St. subway station—the most heavily traversed station in Greenwich Village, and a serious foot traffic area downtown. It's also across from the West 4th St. courts, where pro NBA players come to play pick-up games against the city's best amateurs. The watching crowds get to be six-deep on the sidewalk across the street. Add in the theatre next to the rats-taurant and the extended hours due to the area's being lively until about 3 a.m. and you get an idea of how “popular” this place was.
Yeah, I've eaten there too. Me and the kids. Their mom would pick them up from me on weekends in front of the place or right across the street.
Urrrrrrgh.
When this story broke, several things happened. First, people were rightfully skeeved the fuck out, and to a man—everybody I knew predicted the same thing: That despite what the owners were saying, THAT PLACE WOULD NEVER RE-OPEN. And that any food-service place daring to open in the space was taking a monstrous gamble as the space was now known as “The Rats-taurant”. This would be no urban legend—it would be an urban truth. As of this writing, no tenant has taken the space, as people still walk by snapping digital pics of the infamous joint.
Second, the story kicked local KFCs, but worse, Taco Bells business into the shitter. Rightly or wrongly, folks judged ALL of the restaurants based on that one “Willard-esque” example. The Taco Bells suffered even moreso because not long before, there had been the National e.coli scare with lettuce and scallions in their stores. Both chains Manhattan business has been drastically affected to this day.
Third, there were some mitigating factors in that rat story. You see, with the place's hours sometimes running till three and four a.m., there was no fucking way they had the place dark long enough to clean it thoroughly and properly. It was a small space doing huge business, so my guess is that they stored a LOT more food than they legally had space for, meaning that a lot of it was stored improperly, allowing vermin to get at it like a Goddamned smorgasbord in the downstairs storage area.
What's more, the building next door, the former Waverly Theatre was being gutted down to damn near its timbers. They tore that place apart over the span of a year for a renovation and practically opened up the earth next to the Taco Bell. When you do that kind of gut work, you invariably disturb what lies beneath most buildings—namely the plumbing, pipework, the sewers, and the creatures that live in 'em—namely Rats. If you found yourself out at say...4:30 a.m. down there, you'd see rats scuttling along the curb, noshing at the Taco Bell's garbage and at the Arby's garbage 300 feet south of there.
Greed, (unsafely overstocking to meet demand) negligence, and a rodent problem beyond their control (the rehab next door) doomed that place.
On a side note, I actually once found myself in there with an old schoolmate, the designer Marc Jacobs about 10 years ago at maybe...1;30 in the morning. So yeah, everybody ate there.
cont'd.
cont.
Now, as to cats, I have NO problem with 'em in most stores. My father ran a restaurant and a bakery, and he ALWAYS had a cat in the bakery to keep vermin in deep check. Bakeries tend to have a bit more sprawl than restaurants do, what with large ovens and cooling racks eating up the space. A restaurant kitchen has more concentrated foot traffic, which meeses don't cotton to. They like it quiet and secluded. Plus, in restaurants, you're not dealing with the messiness of constantly sloughing around 100 lb bags of sugar and flour and the resulting spills. Most of that granular stuff is stored in a secluded area, (away from sack-tearing racks whizzing by) often on pallettes a mere four inches off the ground. That's a rodent's holiday, kids.
Most bakeries have a “bakery cat”. You keep his litter box near a loading bay door away from open foodstuffs and firmly let him know where he can and cannot venture with sharp voice commands. They learn. And they DO keep mice and rats away.
Now, in a restaurant environment you're dealing with a different issue. You're more liable to be preparing foods made from things that cats like—meats, poultry and fish. So while having a kitty around to battle bold mice in a restaurant's prep area might seem cool to do, there is the constant risk of animals being animals and fucking with tasty things they love that are not meant for them. I kind of draw the line at restaurants. In that smaller workspace, cats could tend to be underfoot more, and the stuff that gets dropped in a kitchen is gonna be a lot more attractive to a cat than what gets dropped in a bakery.
Flour or a just-shaved bit of excess salmon? You KNOW what “Mittens” is gonna nibble at.
Bodega/Deli cats I have a slight problem with n that some store owners use the cats in lieu of just cleaning up thoroughly. I wouldn't trust a place that had dusty-ass cans and boxes and a cat as much as I would a brightly lit one, with clean items and NO cat.They're cats...not Supermen. They can't get every mouse in the joint, so I hedge my bets. If you're going to have a cat in a Deli/Bodega you should have to endure a few more inspections than a place that does not.Seems a fair price to pay for having a resident there who walks on the floors without washing his hands several times a day.
Bottom line is, cats DO keep the mousie population down in stores that have 'em—no doubt. But that doesn't mean having a cat allows an owner to scrimp on cleanliness because he's got a fierce vermin catcher on site 24-7-365.
Last thing—my tale of the KFC at the corner of Flatbush and Fulton in Downtown Brooklyn. I'm in there late one Friday night, about 10 years ago on line for some grub for a trip into Manhattan. Line's about six people long, when I hear, and the see along the far-right wall, a largish rat—maybe 8-9 inches (excluding tail) squeeze his fat ass under the plexiglass partition separating the prep/register from the ordering/dining area where we were. This dusty, brown monster hugged the wall, slowly making his way along to the front of the store. I followed him with my eyes all the way, saying “What the fuck?” in my brain, as the woman in front of me said aloud “Oh HELL NO!” That rat staggered down that wall and squeezed his way through an impossibly crevice at the store's front and out—somewhere. The woman in front of me turned in her heel and said “That's it!”, and left the line. A man behind me said “Oh fuck this.” and walked out with me fast on his heels. One other person booked up as well, but I'll be damned if the person closest to the window and the one immediately behind him didn't stay the fuck there for their food. Ick.
Standing outside, the “Oh fuck this.” guys said something that made me hurt myself laughing. As we stood there looking in amazement at the two who stayed for their Kentucky Fried Droppings he said, “Yo, when the rat is leaving the place I'm gettin' food from, looking like he's sick? Yo, fuck that place for-EVER!”
i once lived in an apartment building where my apartment was the only one that actually touched the ground. The first two years I had no mice, but after that I started seeing them. I tried traps and so on, but it didn't help. (I have a good story about vacuuming up a mouse.)
After thinking about not having mice the first two or three years, and the previous tenant had a cat.... I invited in a neighbor cat every so often to rub himself against the walls. The mice disappeared. Apparently the smell of cat makes them go elsewhere. (I doubt it would work with rats though...)
I hear you on the "don't use a shop cat as a cleaning shortcut" advice.
That said-I love me a good shop cat. My favorite bodegas have shop cats and they are the first members of the crew I greet upon entry.
Also, someday when they have to close the subway station at 6th ave. and 14th st. for track maintenance or whatever they do when they close a station for a weekend, I hope they let a bakers dozen or so of big, fierce, hungry cats loose down there. It's nuts-so rat and mouse infested. Waiting for an F train down there is like watching the National Geographic channel.
I've heard that NYC has had a huge rat-control problem for a rather long time.
“Also, someday when they have to close the subway station at 6th ave. and 14th st. for track maintenance or whatever they do when they close a station for a weekend, I hope they let a bakers dozen or so of big, fierce, hungry cats loose down there. It's nuts-so rat and mouse infested. Waiting for an F train down there is like watching the National Geographic channel.”
Mr. Stoopid;
You're a true NY-er. Only a dyed-in-the-wool NY-er would be hip to that situation in the F Train's 14th St. station. The same problem exists at the 23rd St. station nine blocks north.
After 11 p.m., once the passenger traffic dissipates, Willard, Ben and the whole damn vermin crew come out to play at the platform ends—the middle of the platform is where the late-night passengers tend to congregate. Late one night, me and a few other passengers saw a multitude of rats scuttling about on the southern end of the downtown platform at 23rd St. One guy referred to it as a “Million Rat March”.
NY's problem is that in being a 24-hour city—including the subways which operate at all hours—you almost never get a chance to shut things down long enough to clean up thoroughly. Add in a wet, subterranean series of tunnels—900 miles worth in the subway alone, where 4 million people travel daily and sometimes ditch their refuse while traveling, and you have a rat metropolis.
But those two stations on the 6th Avenue Line, (and the way the tunnels between 'em dip past the hundred-year-old water mains next to 'em), yeesh! You ain't kiddin'!
Matthew Saroff:
The poisons involved generally have an emetic, and rats cannot throw up, but cats do so with aplomb.
Cool, I did not know that.
Another stop on that 6th Ave line: I work near the Broadway-Lafayette station. A couple of nights I've had to work into the wee hours. Going home, I'd be waiting on that platform, and a big rat would be wandering the platform, sniffing for God-knows-what. Didn't seem to give a rat's ass, so to speak, that I was there. There were moments when I wondered if it would walk right up to me and start eating my foot.
When I was a medic, we had different rules for trauma and for medical (heart attacks, asthma and shit; not knife and gun club calls) as to how long you could stay on scene.
Medical calls, your basic Code-Blue, you worked that right there for tubing them, two full rounds of drugs, and maybe even a third, before you moved out to the hospital. It was quite possible to spend 30-45 minutes on scene for a medical case getting a good history, talking to family, running a breathing treatment, finding just what the fuck was going on, and making sure the patient was taken care of.
Trauma... way different.
Thing you have to remember about trauma is simple. Paramedics don't ever (hardly ever) cure trauma. Surgeons cure trauma.
I can cure, actually save the damn life, bring a medical patient back from the fucking dead, Gods willing and he creek don't rise. Don't happen very damn often, but it does happen. And I absolutely can do good shit for medical people who are having trouble breathing, who have OD'd or have fucked up their insulin. Those people I can flat out save on the spot. Not a permanent cure. I can't reverse their condition forever. No one can. I can get them back to normal, little bit. And then to the hospital, where they'll work with them to stabilize them and make sure nothing else is going on.
I can do jack shit about trauma except hopefully keep you from dying on the way to a surgeon heading up a trauma team.
We used to have a rule in the bad parts of North Little Rock, in Houston's 5th Ward, down by the stockyards in Oklahoma City, in South Tucson, and in Oakland -- I'm not exaggerating even slightly -- which was: pick a square yard [a three foot space anywhere; on the floor, wall, ceiling, the patient's legs and tummy, the sink, any three foot square anywhere in the house] and never let it out of your sight.
Once three cockroaches have run across that three foot square space, you need to be moving. Doesn't matter what else needs to be done; you need to be hauling ass to the hospital.
Any suggestions on how to slim down a cat? Particularly when the other cat does not need to.
Any suggestions on how to slim down a cat? Particularly when the other cat does not need to .
Is there somewhere the one that doesn't need to loose weight can get to that the little fat one can't? If so, you can put the non-dieting cat's food in that place, and keep control of what the overly large one eats. I had a friend that would put the skinnier (and getting skinnier because her other getting-larger-all-the-time cat was scarfing up all the food) cat's food up on a counter where she could jump and the other could not.
“Any animal around food presents a food contamination threat,” said Robert M. Corrigan, a rodentologist and research scientist for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Um, dr. Corrigan? I believe that would be the rats? If Tabby is up on her shots and checkups, she is probably cleaner than you are.
Matthew, pick up a copy of The New Natural Cat. I've amazed vets with what I've been able to do with Anitra Frazier's advice.
Matthew: ditch the kitty krunchies and feed canned grain free, like Innova Evo or Wellness grain free. Cats are obligate carnivores (the little darlings) and do not snack on celery and rice cakes to lose weight. Protein and fat--great for fat cats. Carbs--will make your cat fat and diabetic.
Plus portion control is easier with canned because cats eat it all at once so there's less competition for leftovers.
I found this site after the pet food contamination scandal, threw out the kibble, and never looked back. Neither did my two sleek, gorgeous killer cats.
moonglum:
Mice are genetically afraid of cat smell, when you eliminate the gene you get "fearless mice" (a.k.a. really fresh catfood):
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/st...-12-13-04-57-
43
I don't know if it is the same with rats.
Kim,
Alright. Tell us about vacuuming up a mouse.
I had a mouse family here a few months back.
A mouse baby almost fell on the electrician in my basement after mommy mouse made a home in the insulation in the ceiling!
We both freaked out! LOL!
I prepared a nice dish of apples and something sweet. Sue me!
I found mom, dad and grandpa mouse all dead by the bowl.
A PRAYER TO BAST:
Beloved Bast, mistress of happiness and bounty, twin of the Sun God, slay the evil that afflicts our minds as you slew the serpent Apep. With your graceful stealth anticipate the moves of all who perpetrate cruelties and stay their hands against the children of light. Grant us the joy of song and dance, and ever watch over us in the lonely places in which we must walk.
Behold nonbelievers!!! Bast, Perfumed Protector, Cat Goddess. Bast is the Sacred Cat and her name means devouring lady. She is depicted as having the body of a woman and the head of a domestic cat. She holds the sacred rattle, Sistrum, and she possesses Utchat, the divine, all-seeing eye of Ra. Fall upon your knees before Her and grovel like the vermin you are!!!
I was vacuuming, and had the nozzle off of the end. I opened the pantry door to sweep, and out of the corner of my eye saw a movement: I looked up and there was a tail hanging out of a roll of Saran Wrap. Without thinking, I put the hose up to the mouse and he disappeared up the tube. I opened the front door and took the vacuum cleaner, still running, out onto the patio, dropped it, and phoned my Mother! She thought he was surely dead by now, but I didn't think so. I hung up and turned the vacuum off. The mouse scurried out of the end of the hose and away, with me stomping after him to scare him.
That would have been the end of it, but a few weeks later, I saw the mouse again. I chased him -- and he ran up into the end of the vacuum cleaner hose! He knew it was a safe place.
Medieval superstition branded cats as "familiars" to witches, and the ensuing felinocide enabled a burgeoning rat population. Result: Bubonic Plague AKA "The Black Death." Personally, I'd prefer the cats and the witches.
The neighbors did comment to me that since my cat (with his belled collar) had unfettered access to the great outdoors, the rodent population all but disappeared around here.
How do you slim down a cat?
Titrate the food dosage. Ease it downwards until they start to lose weight slowly. Then find a maintenance dose. This is the only measure I've found that works. They'll eat out of each other's food bowls once they take the edge off their hunger, so you have to do this globally - all your cats go on a diet.
I use a fluid measuring cup every time I feed my two. 2.5 fluid ounces of dry food (Hill's Prescription Diet c/d) per cat per feeding, which is twice each day. They're still overweight, but not getting more so.
Forget about cats self-limiting if they're indoor-only. Back when I believed this nonsense, one of mine got up to 23 pounds.
.. the ensuing felinocide enabled a burgeoning rat population. Result: Bubonic Plague AKA "The Black Death."
No. Major root causes of the Second Pandemic seem most likely to have been -
(1) Personal sanitation standards that were literally lousy.
(2) The Great Famine of 1315-1317, which set up the populations of Europe by way of hammering their physiologies and immune systems.
(3) Marmot plague. That strain tends to make a beeline for the lungs. And once Yersinia pestis goes pneumonic, it acquires a whole new route of infection - human to human, airborne. The resulting epidemic is thus likely to have a lot higher velocity. Pneumonic plague is also much more lethal than bubonic.
(4) The Mongol Empire. Higher rates of long-distance trade open doors to more things than markets. As does anything else that moves people efficiently from one "disease pool" to the next. Especially when some of the caravan routes run across Mongolia.
I highly recommend John Kelly's book on the subject: The Great Mortality.
Behold nonbelievers!!! Bast, Perfumed Protector, Cat Goddess. Bast is the Sacred Cat and her name means devouring lady. She is depicted as having the body of a woman and the head of a domestic cat. She holds the sacred rattle, Sistrum, and she possesses Utchat, the divine, all-seeing eye of Ra. Fall upon your knees before Her and grovel like the vermin you are!!!
A pre-technical civilization utterly dependent on stored grain? I can just imagine the way they loved their Little Guys.
I named the older of my two "Boudicca". Although she has maybe 10 nicknames, "Sweety Girl" and "Mrs Loves" being two that tend to get used the most.
Yeah, the name turned out to be very appropriate. She pretty much runs the place.
Kim,
How funny!
Nothing beats the rat-sized roaches, roach-sized mosquitoes and flies, and cat-sized rats of my beloved Southern Louisiana.
You haven't lived until you've been bitten by a giant roach and seen (or possibly even eaten...if you're in Acadiana) a Nutria.
*Shudder*
Yep!, our Oscar is a dedicated Mouser.........Chipmunker. Nothing gets past him.
Once, as I carried him back inside, he swiped and grabbed a bird off the bird feeder we were passing. Said bird survived, but I was pretty shocked.
He does a great somersault around his favourite armchair (which we're still trying to capture in its video glory.......... he's too fast).
Should note that the last RN fleet carrier, HMS Ark Royal, had as many as eleven ship's cats for ratting purposes. Once in a while, a cat, taking a fancy to a foreign port, might leave the vessel for ventures new.
Stormy! You're a gamer AND a cat person?!? I'm lovin' ya more and more ...
The kitty has developed glaucoma and cat-aracts.
Kitty was an overnight-only rescue for our vet friend ('I fixed up this feral kitten and nobody wants her because she's not a baby anymore and I have to get her out of the clinic by Friday so keep her until the heat's off, I know you two hate cats) in March 1996. Lesson here, grasshopper? Don't make friends with a vet, they lie like rugs.
To manage the pressure in her eyes, which no longer provide her with much vision at all, we have to put three kinds of drops in them daily. As a result, she can't smell either. We thought that since she had finally quit dropping semi-live prey in the dog's dish--'You know, that barking sound may not be the stealthiest approach to the prey, but I can't stand to see your dumb ass starve--that she was done deterring rodents. Send her to a top notch vet boarding facility this summer for our vacation.
Came home and the house was literally full of mice. The kitchen had mice so bold, Mrs Phoenix caught one under a glass and made me get rid of it. (Relo to the park, successful.) The bedroom wing was burping mice--some nut ran speaker wire through these 1 inch holes in sheetrock, and I'd never patched them...it was a mouse freeway. Woke up to a damn mouse dragging the Powerbar out of my gym bag in my bedroom.
I borrowed a terrier, didn't help worth a damn. We finally poisoned after prolonged cleanup and trapping action, which here in the land of Hanta is not easy, cheap or quick. Glove up, spray bleach solution, wipe...rinse, lather and repeat for 3 weeks. I hate mice more than I hate cats, is what I found out. Trouble is, I have to work, and all they have to do 24/7 is try to access the food we buy and grow.
We're in the market for a new cat. Must be proven mouser, car-wise, and not eliminate indoors.
Biggest rat I ever saw was in the East Broadway F station. Fortunately, it was on the opposite platform, but it looked to be about cat-sized.
Mice, I can deal with, even if I don't like them. I've lived through a couple of mouse infestations: one, when I was living at home and the stray who kept our rodent population to a dull roar wandered off to die. We lived in the woods, and it was winter, and we kept our garbage in the garage, which was under the house. Some mice made a nest in the insulation under the oven, and would scurry out of the burners whenever we turned on the oven. My mother hated mice more than cats, so one morning, we found her in the kitchen in her bathrobe, wielding a broom. "That's IT," she said. "We are getting a cat TODAY."
And, damn, if that cat wasn't the world's best mouser. Cleaned up our house, the yard, the neighbors' place. And when the mice were gone, the moles and snakes started turning up as offerings. Stone killer, that cat.
The second infestation was when I lived in a row house in Jersey City. The invasion started when the house next door started undergoing a gut reno. My roommate had two cats, but they had no killer instinct. They'd chase them, pounce on them, etc., but rarely actually finish them off. I don't know how many half-dead mice we had to scoop up and throw out, not to mention the live ones that would get into our garbage can and then be bagged up and hustled out.
So when I got my own place, and my own cat, I made sure to get one who'd been out on the street for at least a while, on the theory that hunger makes a hunter. And sure enough, my kitties have caught at least two mice that I'm aware of. The body of the first one disappeared after I noted its existence and praised the hunter's skill (and then went back to bed). The second greeted me at the door -- all of my pets, the dog and both cats, were arrayed around the dead mouse, waiting for me when I got home from work.
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