Oh please Charles, really now. I mean really.

The shit is strong with this posting.

Pizza is an equalizer among the classes, orders, families, genera, and species.

You see a rat, but I see: http://i.imgur.com/aZUX6ue.jpg

As the proud owner of many pet rats, let me tell you that they make great pets. They are very clean, very friendly, sociable, and can be trained quite quickly. Mine come when you call them and sit right in your hand.

Honestly, that does not look like a city rat. It looks like someone took their pet rat and gave him a slice of pizza to film this. Could be, but city rats tend to be bigger and much less "clean" looking, but I dunno.

Also, "slimy tail?" Huh? Since when do rats have "slimy tails?" It's just skin, my man.

(Originally posted this in the wrong thread. Maybe an admin can delete it over there)

I never had any sort of emotional reaction to city rats at all until after the 2001 earthquake. Back then we had an office in Pioneer Square. You'd see rats all the time. Then the earthquake.

Apparently the Seattle sewer system and underground beneath downtown was damaged during that quake. So crews spent a great deal of time under the city making noise. This tended to chase the rats out. So at night under the viaduct you'd see rats everywhere. And when I say "rats" I mean thirty forty or fifty rats. My dog would walk home with us. And he'd see those rats and go nuts. The rats would scatter and run and jump into any escape route they could find. You'd see rat tails wiggle and disappear into tiny cracks in the brickwork like somebody sucking down a spaghetti noodle - "flip!"

Then one time around 8 o'clock walking under the viaduct next to a car my dog cornered what I thought was a huge filthy cat. He was frantically trying to kill it.

It wasn't a cat. Out from under this car scrambled like eight filthy oily rats all stuck together - some dead - with garbage and their tails tangled. It was like a god damned horror movie. They were panicked, squealing and hissing. And they ran right at us like a giant hairy spider.

I have never felt that level of gut wrenching visceral revulsion before or since.

It's likely Seattle rats and New York rats are different. (Seattle ranks higher for rat infestations than New York, interestingly enough.) Seattle rats are generally heavier, proportionally -- based on my sightings in Chinatown.

It's completely plausible that this is a legit New York subway rat. Every time I visit New York, seeing a rat couple scurry on the subway tracks is my inagaural "Yes, I'm in New York" moment every time.. and this rat definitely looks like a subway rat.

The saddest part about the Pizza Rat story is that the slice was likely from Sbarro.

Charles, you're demonstrating what I call the insanity of modern man, who sees the natural world as something to hate, fear, as an eternal enemy. You are not a participant of life, but one who is constantly at war with it. It is an essential lack of empathy, and a reliance on paranoia. If it's not an enemy, then it becomes something you want to control, a pet. This insanity is the drive that is destroying our environment, while also denying that it is doing so. Climate change is real, and while greed is the likely suspect behind it, behind that is the insanity that nature is something to conquer and tame. A thing outside of ourselves instead of something we are wholly participating within.

Just shows that if you are craving "a slice", NYC is the place go to get that craving satisfied!

"Natural enemy of humankind"? Or natural parasite of humankind... Like lice or fleas, feasting off the larger social body. Except when it comes to pizza, that puts those frakers in direct competition with one of my favorite food resources. Time to die.

@5 - Rats also constantly dribble a trickle of urine wherever they go as a sort of scent trail, as I'm told, so if you have a rat crawling around your sweater, it's peeing on you. Sorry, not for me. Too gross.

@6 - That's called a 'Rat King', I didn't actually think they actually existed in real life... . o_O

*actually

@11: Not entirely true. They do dribble when they are scared or in a new place, but it is anything but "constant." Trust me, you can tell when they have dribbled piss on you and when they have not.

@9 - So what attitude should one take towards verminous spoilers of stored food and a top-three vector of deadly disease?

Isn't a recognition of a threat an honest engagement with the natural world? It seems to me the epitome of modern alienation from the natural world to get sentimental about a filthy rat.

I too had pet rats for many years. They make spectacular, easy care pets. Pizza rat was cute, sure, but nothing was cuter than my rats scampering across the bathroom counter and stealing tissues from the box to stuff in their house. It was also fun to scare my rat-phobic friends (no, I didn't throw the rats at them!) Of course domestic rats have been bred to be pets and are quite different from their wild cousins. As a farm owner, I've dealt with wild ones too. They're just animals trying to get along. As humans we have a sort of irrational fear about some animals that defies logic. Most people think squirrels are cute, but put a fluffy tail on a rat and it's almost the same animal. And the success of rats as a species is closely tied to the success of humans; that's why there's so many rats in urban areas--abundant food supply (like the pizza) plus reduced predator numbers. I may be sympathetic to rats as a species but I control their numbers in my barn, without illogically demonizing them.

@5: Oh goodie! Now I can call you 'Willard from Baltimore'!

It's not about the pizza, Charles, that was just a rare cute rat - young, spry, full of naive ambition, his whole life ahead of him. He'd look cute rolling a baby's eyeball down those stairs.

@Theodore: you can tell when they have dribbled piss on you and when they have not.

Good to know, I guess, but somehow that doesn't really sell me on the whole pet rat thing.

@18: It never really happens, was what I was trying to convey. I don't get pissed on when I handle the rats.

Rattus rattus or Rattus norvegicus? Let's face it, they'll be here after humans are gone!