DC Noir. A True Story About Rats

[Lutalo]

Growing up in DC I was accustomed to seeing nocturnal squirrels scurrying across streets and between parked cars. Later, after I bought a row house in one of DC's many interesting neighborhoods, my brothers would visit. From the safety of a car, we would go hang out in the alley behind my house to witness the bloody gang turf wars between the rats and the stray cats. No kidding, it was amazing to see pendulum swings of their battles over dominance of a food source found in a neighbors trash can. 

One battle we witnessed went the following: Cat jumps into trashcan for exploration and is immediately chased off by two rats. The cat high tails it, but returns a few moments later with two more cats that chase off the two rats. Rats return with five or more of its biggest muscle. A battle ensues that ends with the cats running off and not coming back.

The kicker to this story is that DC rodent control blamed me for the size and population of the rats and even tried fining me. They observed that the rats, apparently loved to eat the feces of my pitbull ??.

The DCRC noted that because my dog loved catching and killing them (I hated the task of bagging them, so I would pay relatively trustworthy crackheads/and heroin junkies desperate for fix money to clean my yard of the huge rat corpses) the rats had designed an intricate tunnel system under my yard, because of course, while they were terrified of my Pitbull, they desperately loved to eat his feces; a conflict the tunnel system under my yard apparently resolved for the rats.

DCRC advised that the Science Diet Hi-Pro Performance food that my dog regularly consumed made his droppings like steroidal multivitamins to the substantial local rat population.

The dog ??? literally made them grow big and strong enough to challenge and fight off malnourished alley cats. Having punked the cats, the rats had no serious predator to contain them; spurring population growth. An invasion of rats emboldened by disgustingly good nutrition apparently causes the cat version of urban flight.

Initially, I found it difficult to believe that I was somehow partly responsible for the "Food of the Gods"-sized rats in my neighborhood.

Ultimately, I relented and did a better job keeping my backyard (joke to even call it that as it was the size of a tiny burial plot, but that is par for the course in Washington) clear of dooggie ????. I actually became good friends with all the sustainable garden hippies in my neighborhood for giving them a magic? pill for their compost and fertilizer concoctions.

The attached photo of the rat caught and killed in DC's Columbia Heights Neighborhood reminded me of the ones I would frequently see in my Logan/Shaw neighborhood.

Not exactly sure why I am rattling on about rodents and nutritionally enhanced doggie poo. Oddly, I guess the photo stirred the memory of that time in life when I was young, newlywed, expectant father, and a new homeowner in DC when owning a home in DC was actually an attainable goal.

I suppose the moral of the story is that if you own a dog and you live in an urban environment keep your yard clean, or a capabara-sized rat like the one pictured below might pay you a visit and pull up a plate at your dinner table.

Edited August 3, 2018 by Lutalo

[winter]

 

Edited August 18, 2018 by nte

[Lutalo]

1 hour ago, nte said:

Okay it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. After you said rats and multivitamins in the other thread I was reminded of the time I opened a closet and discovered that mice has eaten a whole bag of cough drops.

??. What's comforting about mice in your closet is, since rats eat mice, they don't tend to occupy the same space at the same time. Thus, if you have mice you probably don't have rats; if that bit of information helps any ????

Edited August 4, 2018 by Lutalo

[Hunka Hunka Burning Love]

Those would fetch a pretty penny per pound at the local Thai market!    Tastes like chicken!

 

Edited August 4, 2018 by Hunka Hunka Burning Love

[Lutalo]

1 hour ago, Hunka Hunka Burning Love said:

Those would fetch a pretty penny per pound at the local Thai market!    Tastes like chicken!

 

?????

[nute]

Ive seen big farm rats square up to cats, neither one backing down. The big wild rats really are rather frightening and certainly would hold their own against most cats.

I used to do a lot of pest control for the local farmer who had a grain store in a barn which was next to a disused slurry lagoon and empty farm buildings and offices. If you opened up the doors at night the top of the grain pile was black with rats. I used a n air rifle with a night vision sight on it to pick them off but walking around in the disused farm buildings  in pitch black was very unnerving. I would frequently see rats at eye level just a few feet away. 

My best total was 90+ in one evening. Going back the next day to pick up all the dead ones was unpleasant. 

[Lutalo]

3 hours ago, nute said:

Ive seen big farm rats square up to cats, neither one backing down. The big wild rats really are rather frightening and certainly would hold their own against most cats.

I used to do a lot of pest control for the local farmer who had a grain store in a barn which was next to a disused slurry lagoon and empty farm buildings and offices. If you opened up the doors at night the top of the grain pile was black with rats. I used a n air rifle with a night vision sight on it to pick them off but walking around in the disused farm buildings  in pitch black was very unnerving. I would frequently see rats at eye level just a few feet away. 

My best total was 90+ in one evening. Going back the next day to pick up all the dead ones was unpleasant. 

The scary thing about the rat caught in this DC neighborhood is its size. I learned from my conversations with DC Rodent Control that rats live in highly organized communities.

The ones seen scurrying about are usually the lowly recon rats that the rat community sends out to test food sources. If the food source kills the  recon rat dies the other rats avoid the food source. If good they either go to the food source or bring it back to the nest.

I imagine rats the size of the one caught in DC would normally be alphas; not recon rats; which is why rats of such massive proportions are rarely caught and killed. According to conversations DC Rodent Control:

1. seeing rats means infestation, period. Wherever there is one there are hundreds, and maybe thousands nearby. 2. The ones we see in the stree are usually lowly recon rats.

3. If the dead rat in the photo was a recon rat, I shudder to imagine the size of the seldom seen alphas that must live in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. 

The rat in the photo could be a rarely seen alpha. DC construction is always ongoing at the level depicted in the movie "Dark City" with keifer Southerland.

Construction upsets dens so we may be merely seeing alphas that have had dens upturned by construction machinery.

[Hunka Hunka Burning Love]

Got rats?  You need a mink!  

  

[Lutalo]

5 hours ago, Hunka Hunka Burning Love said:

Got rats?  You need a mink!  

  

Nice! If they unleashed the mink upon the rat population in DC the Red Foxes roaming the city in the middle of the night would hunt and eat the mink and the rats. It would diversify food sources and possibly bring even more Fox dens into the city. I'm for domesticating the foxes and using them for rodent  control. ?? 

https://citywildlife.org/urban-wildlife/area-wildlife/

[Lutalo]

I hope that they are vaccinating those poor minks with concentrated vacs. I imagine that their ability to carry and spread deadly diseases without themselves becoming sick is a defense mechanism against predators. 

[Dingfelder]

On 8/2/2018 at 1:09 PM, Lutalo said:

The attached photo of the rat caught and killed

As expected, the Rat IMF disavowed any knowledge of the rat's actions ...

[Dingfelder]

On 8/11/2018 at 2:01 PM, nute said:

Ive seen big farm rats square up to cats, neither one backing down. The big wild rats really are rather frightening and certainly would hold their own against most cats.

I used to do a lot of pest control for the local farmer who had a grain store in a barn which was next to a disused slurry lagoon and empty farm buildings and offices. If you opened up the doors at night the top of the grain pile was black with rats. I used a n air rifle with a night vision sight on it to pick them off but walking around in the disused farm buildings  in pitch black was very unnerving. I would frequently see rats at eye level just a few feet away. 

My best total was 90+ in one evening. Going back the next day to pick up all the dead ones was unpleasant. 

Good God, what did all that filth do to the grain ...

[Lutalo]

41 minutes ago, Dingfelder said:

As expected, the Rat IMF disavowed any knowledge of the rat's actions ...

??

[Lutalo]

On 8/11/2018 at 5:01 PM, nute said:

Ive seen big farm rats square up to cats, neither one backing down. The big wild rats really are rather frightening and certainly would hold their own against most cats.

I used to do a lot of pest control for the local farmer who had a grain store in a barn which was next to a disused slurry lagoon and empty farm buildings and offices. If you opened up the doors at night the top of the grain pile was black with rats. I used a n air rifle with a night vision sight on it to pick them off but walking around in the disused farm buildings  in pitch black was very unnerving. I would frequently see rats at eye level just a few feet away. 

My best total was 90+ in one evening. Going back the next day to pick up all the dead ones was unpleasant. 

Your description of this job reminds me of the Stephen King story/movie Nightshift. The story goes: guy wanders in to one of the many shitsplat towns scattered about the state of Maine and takes a job in an old mill running some sort of machine for processing cotton. Place is infested with rats that turn out to have a strange connection with the monster hiding under the facility: just another fairly decent Stevie King short story turned cheesy movie script - I'm sure that you have seen it. ?

[nute]

Lol, not seen it ... maybe i need to get it on audiobook. 

It was freaky walking about in the disused farm buildings seeing the damn things at eye level or even over your head on the beams and things. I had to be careful where i shot as the farmer didn't want lots of holes in the walls.

I assume the grain went into the human food chain, I'm assuming the buyers had ways of filtering the rat craps out but i don't know.  Kind of gross. Although when the fields are being harvested there are an assortment of things which get eaten by the combine and diced up. 

[Dingfelder]

7 hours ago, nute said:

I'm assuming the buyers had ways of filtering the rat craps out but i don't know.  

I guess that's what livers are for.

I read that Stephen King story a time or two.  It was a redo of an old H.P. Lovecraft tale,  "The Rats in the Walls."  Both are good but the HPL is better.

I'm usually a super softy when it comes to animals, but I just can't muster it for rats.  They're way too destructive and disease-ridden. 

 

[Lutalo]

8 hours ago, nute said:

Lol, not seen it ... maybe i need to get it on audiobook. 

It was freaky walking about in the disused farm buildings seeing the damn things at eye level or even over your head on the beams and things. I had to be careful where i shot as the farmer didn't want lots of holes in the walls.

I assume the grain went into the human food chain, I'm assuming the buyers had ways of filtering the rat craps out but i don't know.  Kind of gross. Although when the fields are being harvested there are an assortment of things which get eaten by the combine and diced up. 

I have often wondered about the dark chunks in my oatmeal. ??

[Lutalo]

29 minutes ago, Dingfelder said:

I guess that's what livers are for.

I read that Stephen King story a time or two.  It was a redo of an old H.P. Lovecraft tale,  "The Rats in the Walls."  Both are good but the HPL is better.

I'm usually a super softy when it comes to animals, but I just can't muster it for rats.  They're way too destructive and disease-ridden. 

 

HPL is a master. Although most of the movie adaptations of his work have sucked big time in my not so humble opinion.

I have read a bunch of stuff from SK Inc. But I have only seen the movie in this case; cheesy, but entertaining if you have nothing better to do with an hour and a half. 

[Dingfelder]

I loved King's first few, back when he had an editor, but haven't read anything but the occasional disappointing short story of his for decades now.  Lovecraft was really great and inventive.  I loved Pickman's Model and so many others.  I still love almost any Cthulhu meme.  And you can hardly avoid him in modern horror.  Anyone much into it has heard of the Necronomicon, at least, or seen one of the descendants of At The Mountains of Madness, or of The Evil Dead.

[Lutalo]

7 hours ago, Dingfelder said:

I loved King's first few, back when he had an editor, but haven't read anything but the occasional disappointing short story of his for decades now.  Lovecraft was really great and inventive.  I loved Pickman's Model and so many others.  I still love almost any Cthulhu meme.  And you can hardly avoid him in modern horror.  Anyone much into it has heard of the Necronomicon, at least, or seen one of the descendants of At The Mountains of Madness, or of The Evil Dead.

Wow! Been many years since I read that one. I always wondered what Pickman really kept in that basement - rats or something nastier? ? 

The thing about the Stephen King is that I suspect it to be a brand that includes work written by a stable of a few select ghost writers releasing work under the Stephen King name as opposed to an author. I don't say his because he was so very prolific; many writers are, or claim to be. I say this because there is little consistency of quality and style in the works branded with his name. 

The character and story development in works like; Shawshank Redemption, Bag of Bones, Deloris Claiborne is far superior to crap like Pet Semetary, Tommyknockers, or Christine. 

My favorite master of the macabre is Edgar Allan Poe. I think he brilliantly matched the brooding shadows of light and dark in setting with the haunted thoughts of his characters lamenting the loss of a connection with beauty. Poe wrote with a poetic elegance not seen since in the horror/thriller genre.

In the fall of the house of Usher for example, The way he wove together the crumbling of economic royalty,  elegance, and privilege, represented by a dreary mansion, with the crippling terror of paranoia, suffocating claustrophobia, deterioration of health, sanity, a moral compass, and a incestuous genetic line was incredibly resonant. 

I still sometimes try to imagine the fear terror Fortunato must have felt as he being buried alive in a wine cellar as punishment for his "thousand injuries." Or try to imagine the terror of the nameless narrator taken prisoner during the Spanish Inquisition and strapped to a table with a razor sharp pendulum slowly descending with each swing; in this story the rats are the heroes. 

Poe, was the dude of horror/psyche thriller/mystery. ??

 

Edited September 28, 2018 by Lutalo

[Dingfelder]

Poe was amazing, and I still love his atmospheric style as well as his psychological acuity.

There are others who have been incredible stand-outs since.  I think HPL must be granted that status though he was nowhere near as good a writer, merely for his inventiveness and his creation of a modern-age horror that didn't depend on the old tropes, religious or otherwise.  His horror was cosmic, good for all ages and any religion, looming over  all of them as if they were trivialities.  It's a wonderfully cold horror.  I also love the passionate metaphor in The Outsider.

Dennis Etchison's The Pike is one of my favorite stories ever, and full of a sad knowledge of human nature.

Of course, At the Mountains of Madness was the foundation of Who Goes There?, later turned into The Thing in movies.  WGT was voted by the science fiction writers' guild as the best sci-fi story of all time.  Every step along the line is well worth seeing .. though the third movie isn't special at all.

Michael Shae's "The Autopsy" was another one that strikes me as about as good as a story can get.

Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" is heart-stoppingly great too.

Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" is about as deep with powerful metaphor as a work can be without becoming in the least incoherent.  I've changed my mind about it several times since first reading it.

Kafka's Metamorphosis supplied my favorite opening line ever, "Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin"

Paul Bowles supplied probably my favorite final line, "The wind blew the dust along the ground into his mouth as he sang."  Followed in close but respectful proximity by Henry Miller's "Always merry and bright!" and Hemingway's "Wouldn't it be lovely ..."

There has been a lot of great work over the last century-plus.  It isn't always easy to find, though.  People tend to under-rate horror because it is so easy to write (or make a movie of) bad horror.  And that stuff sells; certainly to the extent that it forms the public image of the art.  But the truly good stuff is extremely hard to write.  That's why so few people write anything that lives long in the genre, and few non-fans have a sense of the history of horror fiction.

Yet we do see it cropping up regularly, as often the best and most memorable part of other works, whether popular or literary.  Quentin Tarantino's movies balance on horrific confrontations no less than tea-room mysteries and literary works focus on the horrors of people finally speaking their minds to one another, or realizing things they had never been willing to admit to themselves, from James Joyce's countless epiphanies to Henry Miller's metanoia.  Everybody seems up to the task of putting down horror, but pretty much everybody goes slumming for it in their own way, because it's a basic part of the human experience.

[Lutalo]

On 9/28/2018 at 1:06 AM, Dingfelder said:

It isn't always easy to find, though.  People tend to under-rate horror because it is so easy to write (or make a movie of) bad horror.

I believe that I know what drives a person when I know what they fear. Horror provides a window into the prevalent psychological fears and torments of the societies that produce it.  For example the underlying fear that Zombie films usually propagate is the demise of western civilization through uncontrolled population growth.

The change in population composition is usually represented by a rapid zombie-breeding pathogen introduced through a bite (sex act/reproductive method) from a mentally inferior, but voracious predator operating on an unrelenting and overwhelming imperative to breed even more mentally inferior, but voracious predators (hypersexual) to overrun the presumably Superior, but genetically-challenged in terms of reproduction. The breed-bite changes the physiology and nature of the victim; introducing an insatiable cannibalistic hunger for human flesh.

The mental and sometimes physical inferiority, and horribly disfigured appearances of the zombies are important to heighten the idea that the bite is not an evolution or merely a benign mutation in appearance, but a de-evolution that alters the nature of the victims and introduces a clear and present danger to western civilization.

In zombie films, productive members of a society in rapid, 24 hour decline must abandon productive corporate careers on the fast-track and happy and wholesome suburban lifestyles in picturesque communities to fight the threat to their existence.

Western civilizations' finest representatives of its vaunted self-image are forced to abandon lives encapsulated behind white picket fences, yoga classes, shopping malls, selfies, and frappacinos to become survivalists for the good of humanity.

Gone are the lovingly playful exchanges between sibling rivals over slices of pizza, and adorable moments of small insomniac children knocking on parents' boudoir door obliviously interrupting the heavy petting happening just moments before.

The survivors of the apocalypse join together in small bands making their way toward some Mecca about which they heard where non-zombies are safe from the mindless breeders looking to devour them.  

I think that the genre is dismissed by most "respectable" critics because they imagine themselves and society to be above the base primal fear that horror movies place on loud display. 

Of course, if a film is bad, it is bad. However I have often seen bad films in other genres given credit for raising social issues deemed worthy by the self-appointed guardians of the social perception narrative. 

Last summer, I went to see the film "It Comes at Night." I thought that it was one of the most banal pieces of nonsensical dribble upon which I had ever spent my cash. Well, the critics loved it. The last fractional ounce of credibility I gave them evaporated, because the critics and I are just not on the same page.  

 

Edited September 29, 2018 by Lutalo

[Dingfelder]

Similar to your idea that what people fear is a clue to who they are, I realized young that I would learn more about society from reading the books it bans than from sticking to its classics.  So I sought out Henry Miller, William Burroughs and read just about everything they ever wrote, and anyone else I could find, from political outsiders to philosophers to art critics, poets, film-makers, horror writers, back-to-nature types, etc. who wanted to color outside the lines.

Everything makes more sense when put into context.  And the battle to control the context people think within is probably the primary battle, because it shapes and allows thought, makes it ordinary or inconceivable, simply in how it lays down the groundwork from which everything else can spring.  I remember reading a famous lawyer saying that when someone is on the stand, you should never ask a question you don't already have the answer to.  And some journalists elsewhere saying that a certain pundit could lead you to unsupportable conclusions so long as you gamely went along with what seemed on their surface to be his reasonable premises.  He who controls the dialogue controls its outcome, and a society that wants to close off alternative viewpoints will likely ban them or make them otherwise unavailable (for example prohibitively expensive or economically dangerous to produce) if it has the power to do so.

So I've always found it profitable to listen to "the other guy" and often even seek him out.  It's very hard to get a clear picture of a system when you are part and parcel of it, or be yourself when that self is so highly constructed by so many outside forces that latch onto you from the very start.

 

 

[Lutalo]

1 hour ago, Dingfelder said:

He who controls the dialogue controls its outcome, 

That makes them responsible for the outcomes; whatever they are 

"When the hunter wins, the Lion's story is never heard" - African Proverb 

[dbfrese]

2 hours ago, Dingfelder said:

I realized young that I would learn more about society from reading the books it bans than from sticking to its classics.

Gosh, how'd you get ahold of these banned books? Weren't you afraid the police would come after you for reading banned material? You are very courageous!