Invasion of the Big A** Rats
!!!
After returning from the holidays break, "I was disgusted at finding not
one but two rats nests in my room. There was poop all over the place: under
our beds, on top of our beds..." So said Julieanna Pinto to Quaker Campus'
Matthew Grant Anson ('Rodents Invade Harris dorm', Q C, 1-26-12). Pinto had
to sleep in a dorm lounge, finally getting into Wanberg Hall only after her
mother got involved. Pinto's roommate, Rebecca Cruces, went back to their room
after traps had been put in place and saw yet another rat. "We pay so much
money to live here. They need to take the necessary measures to protect their
residents," added Pinto, referring to the Whittier College administration.
Fellow student Carsen West said, "Until we actually found the rat and called
[Facilities and Campus Safety] they didn't come. After the whole room was destroyed,
I was surprised they weren't up here right away. Their whole room, they couldn't
live in it anymore." Yet again it proved to be the Health Department, no
stranger to Whittier College dorms, that finally compelled the College to act,
ordering corrective measures, most importantly sealing various exterior walls
cracks and openings, which orders Area Coordinator Ted Bogue claims have been
satisfied. Nevertheless, rats, bigger than the traps set for them, continue
to make appearances... Bogue described one of the rats found in horrible fashion:
"When [a rat] came out from behind the stove, [it] was burnt badly."
Rats are associated with bubonic plague and murine typhus through fleas and
feces, rabies, trichinosis, Lassa Fever, and salmonella, among other health
problems, some fatal. It goes without saying that where there are rats there
are diseases. But Whittier College has let the entire rat-borne health issue
go without saying. Students - President Herzberger lives in the President's
mansion off-campus - don't have that luxury. The newly introduced Gambian Pouch
Rat, even now moving west, grows up to three feet long and carries and spreads
monkey pox, which will cause the CDC to quarantine everyone in the vicinity
immediately upon discovery. A rat invasion is a potentially deadly problem,
one difficult to resolve, and one requiring the most stringent cleanup process.
Predictably, Whittier College attempted to counter the Q C rat invasion expose
with a planted article ('Administration points out causes of rat invasion' by
Kaitlyn Baldwin, Q C, 2-9-12). Spokesperson Delaphine Hudson, making the dubious
claim that the College called the Health Department (when dorm ceilings caved
in, it was students who had to call in the Health Department, and that would
again appear to be the case), said, "...Facilities worked extremely hard
to close up holes and cracks in the (exterior) walls." If Facilities worked
let alone worked extremely hard, there wouldn't be any holes or cracks in exterior
walls, and there'd have been no rat invasion. Rats strip electrical wiring with
their teeth while literally destroying buildings, if they don't start them on
fire first. Rats are estimated to gnaw through more than $1 billion of property
a year in the U.S. alone.
To whittiergate: "Whittiergate,
a champion, maybe the only true champion, of Whittier College housekeepers being
overworked, underpaid, and under supplied by Sodexo, and used as pawns by the
SEIU, should be careful to avoid taking out understandable frustration on our
maintenance workers. Our maintenance workers were sold out to be exploited by
Sodexo, too. Sodexo and their on campus straw boss Ken Bohan are responsible
for maintenance deficiencies as well as housekeeping problems on campus.
"Otherwise, keep up the great work!"
whittiergate Note: Thank you. Agreed. See whittiergate's 'Whittier College
Exploits, Disrespects, (Latina) Housekeepers' page for more on this College's
sellout of workers, Sodexo and Ken Bohan...
Yet even as Hudson claimed the College is now in compliance with the orders
the Health Department was obliged to issue because of Whittier College's negligence,
she blamed students for the rat invasion - because, according to Hudson, students
have filthy habits. To whittiergate's knowledge, the Health Department didn't
order dorm residents to be more cleanly, they ordered the College, as Hudson
admits, to seal the invaded dorm. This projection of responsibility for the
College's negligence and failures is typical. Campus Safety, for example, blames
students for carelessness when their possessions are stolen, from their dorm
rooms as well as from cars and public areas, rather than admit Campus Safety's
failure to protect campus residents' property, and improve in that regard. We're
not impressed that Pinto or Cruces or other students whose rooms were taken
over by rats have lower cleanliness standards than do students whose rooms were
not occupied by these big a** rats.
Matthew Grant Anson noted in his Q C article on the 2011-2012 campus rat invasion
that the rats who turned Pinto's and Cruces' Harris Hall room into a rats' nest
gnawed through their room door once in the building. Rats can gnaw through doors
because they can exert 7,000 - 8,000 pounds of pressure per square inch - compare
with lions and great white sharks capable of exerting just 600 pounds of pressure
per square inch. Rats have 16 teeth, 12 molars and 4 sharp incisors, teeth that
are harder than copper, platinum, and iron, that are roughly equivalent to strength
of a steel nail. Rat tooth enamel is one of the toughest materials on earth,
which is why rats can gnaw through not only wood but also plastic, wire mesh,
lead, and iron piping.
Rats were inadvertently introduced to North America around 1775, and the rat
population has remained fairly steady for the past 50 years. Rats can drop 50
feet without injuring themselves, can jump 36 inches vertically and 48 inches
horizontally, and can swim across a half-mile of open water and tread water
for up to 3 days. Rats have been found to have entered buildings through water
or sewage pipes, even emerging from toilet bowls, but their usual means of access
is through cracks and holes due to poor exterior maintenance.
Country folk and largely abandoned inner city residents know rats, they know
that rats don't eat only garbage, that they also eat crops and produce, and
of still greater concern, attack and eat fowl (chickens, ducks, even geese),
young lambs and pigs, small pets and any human beings lying around. New York's
Daily News, as just one example, reported a rat attack on a woman in her 20s
waiting for her train at the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall subway station this past
February. The rat ran up to the woman and bit into the flesh of one of her feet.
Authorities speculate fewer scheduled trash pickups and poor storage room seals
are attracting rats. A single rat is capable of killing prey twice its size.
The press periodically reports infant and elderly deaths due to rat attacks.
Nor does it require famine for rats to cannibalize their own. When rats attack
(for the purpose of eating) humans, they go first for soft tissue like the eyes.
It seems infants and the elderly are at risk for rat attacks for the very young's
and very old's limited abilities to defend themselves, rather like a passed
out college student...
Whittier College student Laurel Pinkley says, "It kind of freaks us out
at night...it's...scary."
To whittiergate: "You
appear to be quite right about rats eating eyes first. See this link to 'North
Korea Prison Camp Drawings', "Dead bodies storage - because rats eat the
eyeballs first, most corpses don't have eyes"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/25/north-korea-prison-camp-d_n_1624748.html
"Now I'm afraid to sleep let alone pass out on
this campus!"
And these big a** rats are not going away any time soon. Science Daily ('Rats
Are Loyal to Neighborhoods', May 27, 2009) synopsized a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health research project - nearly 300 rats were trapped in 11
residential areas of a large city and were subjected to genetic tests to determine
how the rats were related. It turns out that rat families form communities,
each encompassing about 11 city blocks, with each community composed of rat
neighborhoods about a city block in size.
Rats migrate only when forced to do so, and usually live out their entire lives
within their one block neighborhood. The urban description of 'hood rats', females
who stay home and breed indiscriminately, is based on 'hood' residents' familiarity
with the evident breeding habits of rats.
:
'Hood Rats' begin breeding at around 3 months of age and live for approximately
3 years. Urban rats go into heat every 4 or 5 days (country cousins reproduce
seasonally, but hood rats are pretty much always in heat), and deliver litters
of 6 to 12 offspring. (Octomom, give it up!) A single female rat can release
thousands of offspring into her hood.
While prevention is easy, getting rid of rats is damned difficult. Poisons are
apparently more dangerous to human and other beings than to rats - rats are
already adapting to poisons used against them. Warfarin, for example, a chemical
that prevents blood from clotting, causing death through internal bleeding,
no longer works on adapted rats, such rats now deliberately consume Warfarin
to keep their adapated blood from clotting too much. Rats, by the way, can detect
contaminants in their food as low as 0.5 parts per million. It seems rats have
the capacity to develop effective immunity to all known rodenticides. You've
heard this before, but it seems Whittier College hasn't: An ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure.
Catching rats the tried and true way...
...with a lilttle help from our friends
Again, the rats invading the Whittier College campus are bigger than the traps
used to catch them. This really is the invasion of the Big A** Rats !!!
Carsen West summed up this sobering experience as well as anyone: "When
we first applied [for the hill top dorm]...we were so excited... But now it's
like 'rats!' It's not what we expected at all."
Welcome to the real Whittier College...
See more on Mason's Rats at: http://theskinner.blogspot.com/2011_08_01_archive.html
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