Off topic -- NYT article on rats in Beverly Hills (the 4-legged variety).
September 17, 2002
Up, Down, In and Out in Beverly Hills: Rats
By CHARLIE LeDUFF
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., Sept. 12 - "Beverly Hills is a nice
place to be a rat," Ray Honda explained, admiring the cool,
verdant landscape of the moneyed class, with its fruit
trees, bird feeders, swimming pools and dog-food bowls.
"It's a very good address."
Mr. Honda, a Los Angeles County health inspector whose
speech and demeanor bring Peter Lorre to mind, was quick to
append, "the four-legged kind," adding: "More rats than
people, probably. And when they get really bad you can
smell them."
Across Beverly Hills and the other lush corridors of Los
Angeles, rats - yellow-bellied, pink-tailed, flea-bitten
rats - are wriggling through the woodwork and rooftops.
They have come down from the trees and in from the fields,
forced into neighborhoods by a strangling drought that has
gripped the region. They are eating from dog bowls and
drinking from swimming pools and acting in surly ways not
normal to the genus.
How did rodents end up in the lap of luxury? After four
consecutive mild winters, their population has multiplied,
though no study has been undertaken to determine exactly
how many rats there are in Los Angeles County. The rule of
thumb is one rat for every human, Mr. Honda said. Add in
the severe drought and you have rats commuting to the
neighborhoods with low-hanging fruit, exotic gardens and
patios, with their outdoor parties and exquisite crumbs.
Take the humiliating case of the well-to-do doctor who
recently built himself a dream house off Sunset Boulevard.
The doctor was giving a party a few weeks ago when three
rats helped themselves to the crumbs of his outdoor buffet
table. One scurried into the postmodern palace through an
open door.
If that were not enough, the doctor found five rats
swimming in his marble pool on a recent Saturday afternoon.
Mr. Honda, the ratologist, was called in for consultation.
"The thing to do is keep the rats out of the house," he
told the housekeeper. "And keep the bamboo shoots trimmed.
They like bamboo shoots."
The doctor was called at his office for a telephone
conference.
"In my pool," the doctor sighed in the tone of a man who
has found a scratch on his new car. "I just built the
place. I hear this is happening all over Beverly Hills.
It's the drought, they say."
Before he put the phone back on the receiver, the doctor
asked a favor. "Can you keep my name out of the newspaper?"
The four-legged scourge is commonly known as the roof rat.
Unlike its city cousin the Norway rat, which prefers the
denuded and grimy confines of the East Coast, the roof rat,
or Rattus rattus, prefers the warm climes of the West. An
excellent climber, it lives in trees, shrubs and attics. It
is less aggressive and well suited to the California
lifestyle, preferring a vegetarian diet.
The roof rat, the carrier of the Black Plague, is a roamer
and will take it upon itself to walk to more hospitable
habitat - lush suburban-style enclaves like Beverly Hills,
Joining the roof rat in ZIP code 90210 are the wood or
field rats, which have been pushed out of the hills by
brush fires and the continuing building boom.
For now, the county is not pursuing wholesale rat
eradication. Its budget for rodent control efforts - mainly
putting out poison - is the same as last year's. But that
may change as the infestation persists.
Over the last two months a half-dozen restaurants have
temporarily closed along the Santa Monica Promenade because
of rats. Then there are the phone calls from the
panic-stricken socialites in Beverly Hills and Pacific
Palisades.
"We'll get hysterical calls about rats crawling on the
roofs of houses in Beverly Hills," said Oscar Gonzalez, an
exterminator to the stars, who said business is up 30
percent this year. "But that's the price you pay for
messing with Mother Nature," Mr. Gonzalez said. "The closer
you live to the wild, the closer the wild is to you."
It is not just Beverly Hills. Rats have become a problem
across the desiccated West. The lush rose gardens of
Pasadena are infested. In Hawaii, the country mice of the
sugar cane fields have moved to the city in search of a
better way of life. North of Flagstaff, Ariz., health
officials have captured plague-toting rodents.
As New Yorkers know so well, rats are indomitable
survivors. They can wiggle through a hole the size of a
quarter. They can jump two feet high and eight feet long.
Able to swim a half-mile and tread water for three days,
they can survive being flushed down a toilet and have been
found alive in a block of ice. Rats can chew through metal,
wood and concrete, which is necessary to their survival
because their incisors grow five inches a year, and left
unchecked, their teeth would grow through the roofs of
their mouths. They breed voraciously and are said to have
15,000 descendants before they die in a year.
Up the coast in Ventura, the public beaches are overrun
with rodents.
"The problem is people keep feeding them," said Mike
Montoya, the city parks manager. "We've got people taking
30-pound bags of dog food and buckets of water and leaving
it out for the squirrels and birds and, yes, the rats. If
we take the food away, the rats might move towards town."
But Ventura officials may have contributed to the problem.
Several years ago, dogcatchers rounded up the feral cats
that marauded Ventura's public beaches. Without the
predators, rats have flourished.
In a related case, a brouhaha is bubbling on the beaches of
San Pedro in southern Los Angeles, which does not have a
rat problem. Animal control officials are considering
trapping and removing the 100 or so feral cats that make
their dens under the piers. The cats, some residents
complain, have created a giant stinking litter box.
Cat lovers vow a fight. "You take them away and we're going
to get rats," said Joann Adler, a local, who collects the
cats, has them neutered and then returns them to the
beaches. "Besides, what are they going to do with the cats
after they capture them? Kill them. That's what."
A solution to the cat and rat problem might be found in
downtown Los Angeles, where rats once overran the flower
market, gorging themselves on carnations. In an interesting
piece of urban wildlife management, a pride of feral cats
was introduced, and according to Mr. Honda, the market has
never looked cleaner, rat-wise.
Perhaps, it was suggested to Mr. Honda, the neutered beach
cats from San Pedro could be set loose in the alleys and
peaks of Beverly Hills. The cats would hunt rats, never
reproduce and die of old age.
"I wonder if the city of Beverly Hills would go for
something like that." Mr. Honda said.
A call was made to the Beverly Hills City Hall. "Feral
cats? Oh, no," said a city official, who asked to remain
anonymous, because indiscretions often lead to
unemployment.
"People here already complain about the coyotes and
raccoons and skunks," the official said. "They'd never
stand for feral cats."
If any proof of this was needed, an old man who lives in
the hills of Alpine Drive happily accepted a bucket of rat
poison from Mr. Honda. As an afterthought, he asked, "You
have anything for rabbits?"
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company. |
