A Wisconsin woman who lived in a mobile home with 300 rats will be evicted, and her home and the rats will be destroyed. Wausau Daily Herald: "The problem began when Flatoff, 58, began buying domesticated rats at pet stores and bringing them home, according to health officials. Over time, the rats running loose bred with wild rats and their offspring overran the property."

  • itsgene

    Why are trailer parks always named “estates?”

    • http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

       It sounds more dignified than “cheap land by the freight line.”

    • Antinous / Moderator

      ‘Estate’ is UK for ‘development’, thus The Projects are Council Estates. Using it in the US would seem to be a gambit to make it sound ritzier.

      • Donald Petersen

        The double-wide aluminum palace of my youth was located in the “Rios Canyon Mobile Manor.”  I had to check Google Street View to confirm, but yes, it self-identifies thus to this day.

        Alas, I was not “to the manor born.”  We lived in a rented house until we moved to the trailer park mobile manor shortly after my third birthday.

        • Antinous / Moderator

          ‘Village’ is popular, too, in the wheeled home set.

          • Donald Petersen

            “Manufactured housing,” please.

      • Wreckrob8

        UK pedantry. To me the pluralised ‘estates’ sounds more like a gated community – no doubt abutting a golf course with free membership thrown in. The singular ‘estate’ is your common or garden term for most suburban housing developments whether private or council. The term has stuck to the council estate but has been dropped from most private (non-gated) developments. But that could all change with the inner-city gentrification of old council estates.
        Birch Tree Estates is not the same as The Birch Tree Estate.

  • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

    http://vet.tufts.edu/hoarding/ has some interesting further reading about this sort of thing.

    Short version: It turns out to be amazingly difficult to get people to recognize that they’ve gotten themselves in over their heads, and things generally don’t end well for either the people or the animals.

  • http://profiles.google.com/spockosemail Mr. Spocko

    WILLARD!

  • http://profiles.google.com/spockosemail Mr. Spocko

    And by WILLARD I meant Willard Mitt Romney. 

  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

    Simple solution: Capture a bunch of those invasive Burmese Pythons down in Florida and let them loose in the trailer. Then when all the rats are gone, turn off the heat and open the doors and let the Wisconsin cold take care of the snakes.

    • eldritch

      You’d be surprised where a snake will end up to escape the cold. When you turn off the heat, those pythons are going to crawl into the most unlikely of places, many of them in hidden nooks and crannies, possibly even ending up underground. And they can remain in torpor for months without ill effects.

      So unless you are very careful to collect all of them before any try to escape the cold, you’ll have hungry pythons coming out of hiding in a couple of months.

      • dean_544

        I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

    • http://avarana.blogspot.com MarlboroTestMonkey7

      You can’t rely on the weather, it’s better to exterminate the snakes with snake-eating gorillas.

      • Robert

        And then you can eliminate the gorillas with wild poachers imported from Africa!

  • http://twitter.com/rvitelli Romeo Vitelli

    Animal hoarding can be a major problem but it really affects the neighbourhood when rats are involved.
    http://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/2008/08/no-progress-in-la-rathouse-case.html

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OAUXAA362EXWLYVMPJOKLFB5JQ Incipient Madness

    Just be glad he was accidentally breeding rats. Mice are so much worse. I’ve cleaned up after infestations of both. Mice are much worse.

    Best biological control for rats is a team of ferrets and terriers that were raised together.The ferrets flush out the rats and the terriers kill them. Leave a cat behind  to kill off the crafty rats.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/David-Horton/100001980195134 David Horton

      He? Did you read the story?