(PHOTO: AP Photo)
This is a troubling update on the Wrigley Field renovations from the Chicago Tribune:
“The rats have been running rampant. I’m not kidding you,” (area resident Terie) Kata said. “There are people in the alley and there are still rats running around and it’s daylight.”
Kata and her neighbors took it upon themselves to get rid of the rats. Kata said she went through 12 packs of rat poison quickly. Thomas Findlay, who lives nearby, said he and another neighbor hired a private exterminator to get rid of the vermin on their properties. While Findlay said he isn’t 100 percent sure the renovations caused the rat problem, the timing is suspect.
“We’ve never experienced anything like what we’ve seen the last 12 months,” Findlay said. “We’ve had rats almost on a daily basis walking all around the neighborhood. In the streets, on the sidewalks, on people’s porches.”
According to the Tribune, “the Cubs have worked with the city to curb the issues with rats but have not received any complaints about rats since the fall.”
It’s an unfortunate fact of urban life that any major construction project will upset our ever-tenuous detente with the rat kingdom and send a bunch of skeevy little rodents out into the open where they can freak us all out.
But try to think of it from the rats’ perspective for a minute: Those rats had primo housing with access to nearly unlimited discarded pretzel pieces, hot dog buns and ceremonial cakes, plus awesome seats for every Cubs home game. Now they’ve got to improvise, so they’ve really got no choice but to hit the streets and make humans uncomfortable until they find a suitable new spot for their weird, gross nests that we all prefer not to know anything about.
And unless we plan to arm all citizens of Chicago and move on the rat world once and for all, we’re just going to have to deal with a few hundred displaced vermin living among us. Remember that rats tend to have way higher thresholds for unpleasantness than we do, and stand to make all our lives miserable if they ever decide they’re sick of eating only the detritus that trickles down into the underworld and start competing with us for food that has not yet been discarded.
(Thanks to Hardball Talk for calling our attention to this story.)
