Are they comparable though? Because it’s like, just some rats.
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Horny pigeons are noisy as fuck. Having them show off at each other on my windowsill sounds like there’s very loud people having sex. It makes me very cross. Not as bad as herring gulls mind. They’re the worst.
Diseases.
I had to giggle.
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Rats are destructive, breed like nobody’s business, and they’re disease vectors.
I’d say releasing hundreds of rats into a public park is comparable to leaving envelopes of ebola or anthrax in a public park - or to releasing a handful of slavering wolverines, et cetera - in terms of how much harm it is likely to produce.
Then jail her for the offenses she’s proveably liable for - destruction of property, animal abandonment, public health infractions, criminal mischief, whatever applies!
This is absurd. She’s not mentally disabled enough to get put into psychiatric treatment, but she’s mentally disabled enough that they’re unwilling to arrest and jail her for crimes we know she has committed?
She can’t eat her cake and have it too. If she’s too ill to be held accountable for her actions, she needs to be in a psych ward. If she’s not ill enough to be in a psych ward, she needs to be held accountable for her actions!
Meant “lived”, but didn’t catch the typo. “loved” makes the concept even grosser. Sand in your bits is bad enough…
One child’s earthly devastation is equivalent to the damage caused by 4 million pigeons. Just a quick estimate.
Nope. Didn’t get that. But I’m the type that would too.
And yet, I repeat: THERE IS NO PSYCH WARD. Because there is, but there are no beds. There are, like, five beds and those are all occupied by people who are like twenty or fifty or a hundred times more dangerous than this gal.
This is what I call the “guy shitting on my doorstep” problem. See, in San Francisco, there’s a lot of people complaining “there’s a guy shitting on my doorstep, and somebody ought to do something.”
So I start wondering, who’s the guy, and why is he shitting on someone’s doorstep?
He’s a homeless guy. He has no home to go shit in.
- He has a heroin problem.
- He can’t keep a job, so he got tossed from his living situation.
- He lives on the street, so he doesn’t have an indoor bathroom.
So what does our complainant want to have happen?
- He wants the guy to not be shitting on the street. (But he’s unwilling to fund public bathrooms, because they get used as places to take drugs and turn tricks, and they cost money to maintain.)
- He wants the guy to get a job. (But he’s unwilling to fund rehabilitation and job services programs for the homeless and addicts, because that costs him in taxes. He’s also unwilling to hire the guy, because homeless drug addicts are unreliable.)
- He wants the guy to stop using heroin. Bad, useless people who are a drag on society use heroin. But you know what happens when you stop using heroin? You get the flaming shits, and you can’t just wait for a socially acceptable place to do your business.
In the “guy shitting on my doorstep” scenario, the complainant wants the shitter gone - to go shit somewhere else. But he doesn’t want to pay for somewhere for the guy to be. He doesn’t want to pay for the guy to get functional enough to not have to depend on others for a place to be. He just wants the guy to, basically… NOT EXIST.
This is where I really start to wonder: what do you want to want to have happen here? And I think the answer is, the complainant just wants Shitting Guy to vanish, to cease to exist, to not be a problem in his life. And I don’t see how the complainant envisions this happening, other than someone basically exterminating - KILLING - the guy shitting on his doorstep, because he sure doesn’t want to provide any other options.
But we don’t just kill people because they are unpleasant and inconvenient. Rat Girl is very unpleasant, and very inconvenient. Rat Girl is pretty resistant to the easy interventions: someone telling her “you know, you can’t keep raising and releasing rats.” Rat Girl is pretty resistant to people saying “you can live indoors if you stop raising rats.”
Rat Girl is also pretty annoying and frustrating, but she is NOT nearly as annoying and frustrating and DANGEROUS as the person who is muttering about stabbing police officers because they’re really Soviet spies, or the person who attacked a kid in Union Square with a brick, or the person who threw their feces into the patio area of a downtown restaurant, or the person who tried to jump in front of a MUNI bus, or the person who beat their girlfriend half to death because they believed she was turning into a demon. Those five people already have the beds. Those five people already have the intensive caseworker assigned to them (“intensive” meaning the caseworker only has 20 clients, rather than 45.) Those five people already have the master’s student offering them “therapy” through the bars twice a week and the one psychiatrist on the city payroll 10 hours per week prescribing them meds that they can’t legally be forced to take anyway.
Rat Girl and her problems have been declared Not Annoying And Frustrating Enough by our state’s residents and its lobbyists who elected the legislators who passed the laws and made the budgets that trickled down to the services and came to the attention of the administrators who decided how many beds to allocate to mental health in their big seismic rebuild that directed the size of the house that Jack built. There is nowhere to put her. She is not going away.
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Thank you- I now know exactly what my westie is dreaming about when she does that twitching growling thing in her sleep.
It’s like the canine version of “what I’d do if I won the lottery”.
Certainly if it’s a child born and raised in the U.S.
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‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’…‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’
-1984
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The guy would hold the dog under his arm while he scanned for rats, probably because he wanted to make sure the dog would not take off randomly into the street as terriers will do. He’d spot a rat and say “Get the rat!” and launch the terrier as if he was doing a shovel pass with a football. The terrier would land with all his legs churning and pounce on the rat.
Could we please NOW legalize ferrets in California?
So what we need is a euphemism like “care in the community” to make it socially acceptable to have florid schizophrenics and homeless drug addicts wandering at large. Perhaps we could start lacing street drugs with poison, or just releasing highly potent drugs at the rate of about 1-2% of the material on the marks, to eradicate the users.
My life was saved by a schizophrenic (Danny) who was living in adult student housing off Purdue’s main campus.
I was visiting there, and while I was staying in one of the units, my next door neighbor (not the schizophrenic) had a grease fire. He’d fallen asleep with a pot of grease and french fries on the stove.
Danny smelled the smoke, woke my neighbor and got him out - then he went back in, and after putting out the fire, carried out the pot. THEN he realized I might be in my unit. I take anticonvulsants, and thanks them and traveling I’d slept right though the fire alarm - the adjoining vents had filled my room with smoke. I could have slept myself to death. Danny woke me up and guided me out.
This is a man who regularly saw women covered in blood, stabbed and crying in his own room. It terrified him. He had a daughter he could only visit because he was unstable and had developed his condition after her birth. He’d been removed from the home. He was doing his very best, desperate to have a life with his family and peace from the women. He was medicated, and they were trying to stabilize him. I wouldn’t wish what he lived with on anyone.
He saved my life.
The next day, the guys in the lobby were laughing at him again.
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Pigeons can do plenty of damage from all the shit they produce and leave in one spot. I can send along a picture of a small balcony that they covered in several inches of crap in short order because no one stopped them if you like. They really are as close as you can get to rats with wings. They “belong” where they are not being fed by ignorant people, and where there are plenty of predatory birds to keep their population in check. Imagine if everyone just fed stray dogs instead of collecting and neutering them. Even if they were all super friendly, you’d have every flat area covered in dog crap.
