There was a horrific report on Fox32 News the other day. A family living in Austin in the 300 block of North Pine Street was suffering from an invasion of rats. And I’m not talking mice, I’m talking gigantic rats. The video shown on TV had the rats running throughout the apartment. The apartment was clean and well kept, so the problem isn’t on the tenants.
Although I have never had a rat get into my house, I know they’ve been in my garage. And my goal this year is to tear the garage down and build a new one. And I’m working diligently to save money to be able to do just that.
However, in the meantime I’ve done everything I could to keep the rats from building nests in my garage and also from having them burrow their way underneath my garage. I poured a cement ledge all around the entire garage interior walls to cover up the openings that the rats were gnawing their way into. On the outside of the garage, I’ve even put down steel mesh to keep them from digging holes. But they are crafty little creatures, and fighting them is literally a full-time battle.
I think the city of Chicago needs to declare a war on rats! We need rat-killers! I don’t believe the rats are eating that blue-green pellet bait poison that the city comes out to put down. We still have too many trifling people who allow their garbage to be a source of food for the rats. We also have trifling people who like to throw half-eaten boxes of food on the ground rather than place them in a garbage container. And even if the rat eats the poison, unless we see the actual dead body, there’s no proof the poison is killing them. Not with the number of rats we currently have.
If we really want to get a handle on the rat population (the four-legged kind because the two-legged kind in City Hall is another issue, but I digress), then we need a task force that is going out and actually killing the rats. Truly, I want to see a rat’s dead body count. Because without that, there’s no evidence that all the methods the city is using to combat the rat problem is working.
The task force would pick a neighborhood and literally spend the night killing rats. And the goal should be a dead rat body count in the hundreds for a half-mile-square city block area. That rat patrol would also see and ensure that new garbage cans were put into service. And homeowners with all that trash in the backyards would be ticketed.
To me it says a lot that the rats are burrowing their way into a building occupied by people. It says they’re not scared of the people. So, city of Chicago, take a pro-active stand! Come up with a pro-active solution immediately so the rats don’t win the war!
Otherwise everybody’s house will be targeted by that boldly increasing population of rodents!
