Boom Time for Rats

[iam_j4yn3]

Most cats don't want to know from rats. Too big. They prefer mice.

If you want to kill rats, get a Jack Russell Terrier. 90 lbs of attitude in 12 lbs of dog. You just have to get used to having a dog that's more headstrong then you are (and maybe smarter).

ohh yea i heard jack russells are good at that
great idea!!!
awsomely cute too haha
they are smart too i know somebody had one

[OmegaNYC]

Being a Rat sucks:


Inspectors close more city restaurants


The same firm that closed ratty KFC/Taco Bell on Sixth Ave. decided to close all ADF Companies

Eyewitness News

(New York - WABC, March 1, 2007) - The company that owns KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut preemptively closed a handful of its city restaurants after Health Department inspectors found conditions that "obviously do not meet our strict restaurant standards."

The closed restaurants are all franchises operated by ADF Companies of Fairfield, N.J. - the firm that also runs the ratty KFC/Taco Bell franchise on Sixth Avenue.
The Health Department closed the rat-infested Sixth Avenue KFC/Taco Bell last week -- and vowed to reinspect all other restaurants operated by ADF Companies.

After a day of reinspections yesterday, the company that owns KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut decided to close all its ADF Companies franchises that have not yet been inspected by the Health Department.
"These few franchise units, operated by ADF in New York, obviously do not meet our strict restaurant standards based on health inspection reports," said
Emil Brolick, President U.S. Brands, Yum! Brands, Inc.

"They will remain closed until we are absolutely certain they will operate at our high standards. We apologize to our customers and are taking every action, with the assistance of external sanitation experts, to get to the bottom of this. We are redoubling our efforts to inspect every restaurant and are reinforcing all our restaurant cleaning and sanitation procedures," Brolick said.

"We are absolutely committed to our customers and have worked with ADF (a franchisee of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut), to close their uninspected restaurants in New York until they are fully inspected by the health department and given a clean bill of health. We will not compromise on our food and restaurant quality," Brolick added.

A spokesman for Yum! Brands would not say how many KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut restaurants were preemptively closed.
ADF Companies owns 20 fast food restaurants in the city, and runs nearly 400 franchise restaurants across the U.S. They are the second-largest Pizza Hut-franchise operator in the country.

Restaurant Locations Closed by Health Department 6th Avenue
Victory Boulevard
Myrtle Avenue
Hylan Boulevard
Restaurants Closed by Company
Bruckner Boulevard
East Fordham Road
Horace Harding Expressway
Rockaway Boulevard
Queens Boulevard
Fresh Pond Road
Hillside Avenue
Cross Island Pkwy
21st Street
3rd Avenue

Click here to view New York City inspection information for any restaurant!
(Copyright 2007 WABC-TV)

[iam_j4yn3]

ok, just yuk
i bet they closed because it would be more embarasing when they closed cuz of the rats

[lofter1]

The closed restaurants are all franchises operated by ADF Companies of Fairfield, N.J. - the firm that also runs the ratty KFC/Taco Bell franchise on Sixth Avenue.

ADF Companies

Hungry Rat

[lofter1]

Kentucky Fried WHAT ????

[lofter1]

Who me????

Hungry rat with cheeses

£8.95

*****

[User Name]

Maybe rat contraceptives are called for? Or just a more effective poison than the current bromides.

That and people could be neater with their trash.

[iam_j4yn3]

Kentucky Fried WHAT ????

ew ew ew ew ew ew
why oh why did i have to click on WHAT
that's just sick
somebody ate one?
and its not really chicken anyway???

[spatulashack]

ew ew ew ew ew ew
why oh why did i have to click on WHAT
that's just sick
somebody ate one?
and its not really chicken anyway???

That's a classic urban legend but it is completely untrue. Read up on it.

[iam_j4yn3]

That's a classic urban legend but it is completely untrue. Read up on it.

whew
thank you very much
think i was gonna have nightmares

[Ninjahedge]

Nice little barb from John Stewart comparing the Armies Medical Center (forgot the name) to or own KFC...

[scatman]

I don't mean to bring this up again, but y'all need to go into the City's parks at night, especially City Hall......they all mayors up in there!!!!!!

[pianoman11686]

http://imnotsayin.blogspot.com/2007/...-infested.html

[Ninjahedge]

Oh, THAT's where tehy all went. I was wondering what happened to the one at 44th and (5th?)......


You know, i would support the Unions a lot more if they would stop playing from such a position of corrupted power. They started off well enough, and got a lot of things going thatthey really needed and deserved, but once they got a lock on NYC and other areas....

Well, their leaders are more concerned about making more for less work overall. Something we all would like in one way or another for ourselves. But when you have regulations saying you need two guys to lift any cinderblocks larger than 8" (and you go to the site and see one guy lifting and the other guy "directing") you have to think, Is this what we really need?

[brianac]

Where the Rats Come Out to Play

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
In City Hall Park, rats scurry about during the day. “At first I thought it was a squirrel,” said one man who was eating his lunch on a bench.

By THOMAS J. LUECK

Published: November 10, 2007
The New York Times.

The rat that was circling André Thomas’s feet was big and brazen, measuring more than a foot from the tip of its tail to a pointed snout that arched upward to the aroma of Mr. Thomas’s ham and cheese sandwich.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
The rats in City Hall Park seem perfectly at ease there, and sometimes are as playful as squirrels.

The encounter might not have seemed all that unusual to many New Yorkers, who have become wearily accustomed to rats bounding along subway tracks or lurking about garbage bins, usually after dark.

But this rat sighting came as a shock to Mr. Thomas because of when and, especially, where it took place — 2 p.m. on a brilliant fall afternoon while he sat on a bench in City Hall Park, a nine-acre jewel of the municipal park system that underwent a $30 million renovation in 1999. The park is a cornerstone of the city’s efforts to revive Lower Manhattan.

“At first I thought it was a squirrel,” Mr. Thomas said as he strode away. “Isn’t this where the mayor works?”

Mr. Thomas’s rodent experience was hardly unusual. If he had looked under the park’s benches and around its meticulously cropped foliage, he would have spotted at least six other rats scurrying around, unconcerned about the humans all around.

The infestation of rats in City Hall Park, clearly an embarrassment to the city, was acknowledged in interviews by senior officials of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the city’s lead agency for rodent control, and the Department of Parks and Recreation.

“It’s just a big issue down there and we all recognize it,” said Jessica Leighton, the health department’s deputy commissioner for environmental health. Adrian Benepe, the commissioner of parks and recreation, said that City Hall Park provided “a perfect set of circumstances for rats.”

Indeed, the park’s extensive makeover not only produced a verdant oasis, but inadvertently also created a haven for rats: leafy ground cover in abundance, garbage cans that proved rodent-friendly and droves of lunchtime visitors carrying brown bags with deli sandwiches. Adding to that are large construction projects in the neighborhood, including the World Trade Center site, that have forced rats from their underground homes.

Of course, rats can be found in much of the city’s 2,900 acres of parkland. And they are surely no less bothersome to a parent who sees one in her child’s favorite playground than to someone who is part of the largely adult and professional crowd that gathers each day in City Hall Park.

“I don’t know of a park where you won’t see them,” said Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Park Advocates, a nonprofit group dedicated to improving public parks. For years, he said, the city has devoted too little money to controlling rodents in the parks.

Mr. Benepe said there was no way to know if the rat infestation in City Hall Park was worse than in other parks. But, he said, the factors attracting them there went beyond the bread crusts, mustard-laden sandwich wrappers, banana peels and other food that visitors jettison every day.

The park, a historic center of civic life since the early 1600s, when the southern end of Manhattan was a Dutch trading colony called New Amsterdam, sits atop an abandoned subway station as well as some of the city’s most intricately layered tunnels, sewers and underground utility equipment.

“The infrastructure provides subterranean highways for rats,” Mr. Benepe said, “and gives them a warm and secure place in the winter.” And a recent stretch of warm winters has reduced the proportion of the rodent population that would normally be eliminated each year by the cold.

Besides work at ground zero, heavy construction nearly surrounds the park, including work on a new subway transit hub being built at Fulton Street and Broadway. “It’s causing a lot of disruption for rats,” he said.

So far, officials said, several anti-rat measures have been taken at City Hall Park. Pellets laced with rodent poison have been inserted into the burrows that the rats have dug under the park’s lawns and foliage, and in boxlike containers designed to keep them from being eaten by dogs, squirrels or birds.

Ivy, a ground cover that had been used extensively in the park, has been removed, because it provided a hideaway and a breeding ground for rats. Mesh-style garbage containers, which are easy for rodents to get into, have been replaced with solid metal cans.


An outside pest control expert, who has been working as a part-time consultant to the city, is to begin a full-time job of coordinating rat control efforts by several agencies on Tuesday.

Dr. Leighton, an epidemiologist, said the best remedy, would be for “people to be proactive and not throw trash on the ground.”

But for now, it appears, the rats have the upper hand. And their presence in City Hall Park is also remarkable because rats — known generally as a nocturnal species — are coming out in daylight.

They also seem unafraid of people and at perfect ease in their surroundings, sometimes appearing as playful as squirrels.

Steve Jacobs, an urban entomologist at Penn State University who has worked as a consultant on rat control to the National Park Service, said rats were in constant search of new sources of food. And though they tend to shy away from sunlight, they are highly adaptable.

“They have an ability to assess dangers,” Mr. Jacobs said. “If they keep coming back, get a little closer each time, and are rewarded with food, they start to feel comfortable.”

For some regulars in City Hall Park, the rats have aroused more curiosity than alarm. Gerard Ginnane, a health program administrator who works in Lower Manhattan and who has gone to the park around 2 p.m. on most weekdays for years, favors a bench less than 100 yards from the front door to City Hall.
Since early October, he said, he has seen rats on almost every visit. One of them, he said, jumped on top of a chain link fence behind a row of park benches where people were eating their lunch and sashayed to the rim of a garbage can.

“My theory is that the rats are coming out early in the afternoon because that’s when they find food,” he said. “You can’t blame the parks department for not cleaning up, because they do a good job after the lunch crowd is gone. But that means there is little left for the rats at night.”

For tourists who might visit City Hall park only once, an encounter with a rat could be expected to leave a lasting impression. But several out-of-towners interviewed in the park recently seemed to be taking the experience in stride.
Lisa Harris, 32, a fashion designer from Toronto, was sitting on a bench in the park when she realized that a rat was inching toward her feet. She did not move but continued eating her lunch as the rat scurried away.

“What can you do?” Ms. Harris said. “In Canada, we have rats, but I can’t say you would find them in the parks. I don’t like them, but I am not about to scream and jump up and down.”

Frank Kuzma, a retired special education teacher from Grand Rapids, Mich., was in the park with his wife and daughter after visiting his son, a lawyer who works in Lower Manhattan, when a rat appeared, running between shrubs. “Whoa,” he bellowed, “that’s not a squirrel over there!”