Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/09/new-york-has-a-new-rube-goldbe.html
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Have they ever seen a dive bar? People who drown their sorrows in alcohol hate being exposed to natural light.
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“The natural, non-toxic solution in the tank renders the rodent instantly unconscious,” it adds.
Pan-Galactic Rattus Blasters?
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Ok, so to summarize: it’s essentially a large container filled with a liquid that’ll get you very drunk, wich you will leave unsupervised in a squalid area.
I don’t see any potential problems at all with that arrangement. Not a one.
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I can’t find anything more current on this initiative on rat birth control;
Other articles refer back to this study a few years ago, but there doesn’t seem to be any findings that are more recent.
Meanwhile, the city of Toronto does absolutely nothing at all.
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Mmmm… Pickled rat.
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>…you crawl outside for air and you hit the worst part of level 5… the SUN. The sun. You weren’t expecting that were you? You never do… man, you walk out of a bar in daylight and people are on their way to work… or jogging… and they look at you… and they KNOW […] Folks, let’s be honest, if you’re 19 and you stay up all night it’s a victory, it’s like you beat the night… you remember that feeling. If you’re over 30, man, that sun is like God’s flashlight.
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Straws are now illegal, so there’s no way to extract the alcohol. I can totally see taking shots of ratwater being a college activity.
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Rat birth control never stood a chance. Every one knows all rats are fundamentalists.
No, wait, it’s the other way around.
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Once pickled they can be sliced and placed alongside a local deli sandwich!
Rats have infested NYC for 300+ years, I don’t see how buckets of even 80 at a time will make a significant dent?
The device costs $300-$400 and runs on a 9-volt battery. Seems overly complicated to me.
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I think the issue is volume. Most of the traps I found with a few searches caught a handful or two, and those were mostly live.
I almost hate to, but I’d totally slap the top and tell you how many rats you can fit in this baby. Plus it can’t be hard to reset and keep in service.
I still wonder who owns Rat Trap Inc, what their contributions look like, and how much they charge for refills if the… fluid is proprietary.
edit: At a minimum it’ll be easy for someone to say “We’ve removed X thousand rats” at their next press conference
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Mouse Trap Monday guy is king:
Well BB is describing it as a “Rube Goldbergian” machine, and complicated is a feature not a bug …
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If this works, who climbs to the top to become King Vermin in New York next? Pigeons? Venture Capitalists? NYPD?
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So long as there is still something there for rats to eat, they’ll still b3 there. I just finished this book about rats and cities (mostly NYC), and rats breed faster when there’s more food and fewer rats (and they sometimes make this happen themselves, yuck). The only thing guaranteed to kill them before their “natural” lifespan is starvation, apparently:
Dude I can totally see marketing “ratwater” to other college students being a business school capstone project
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There is a joke from Terry Pratchett in all of this I tell ya.
