Rat Problem Grows

Remember when democrats decided the death penalty was a bad thing? They drilled that down into how urban centers stave off disease by granting "rights" to rats:

• “Don’t feed the rats,” cries the city’s newest attempt to combat rat complaints as numbers have risen and the old method for extermination has been halted.
  
  Previously, the city of Chicago was using dry ice as a means to exterminate a large number of rats at a single time, but that method has been put on indefinite hiatus, according to DNAinfo. The hiatus is a result of federal rules as the method was not approved by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as a way to safely control the rat population, Streets and Sanitation spokeswoman Sara McGann told DNAinfo.
  
  As a result of the hiatus, the city is using a new plan to try to get the number of complaints down seeing as they have increased by 30 percent since this time last year. Part of the new approach includes a new poster design depicting a more realistic image of a rat than previous posters had.

We're surprised the Green Party didn't complain that dry-ice was releasing harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

You know what was even more effective that dry-ice though? Poison. Lots of it. Very effective and reasonably cheap, Daley drove the rat population to depths not seen in a century. If you saw a rat and called the Ward office, they baited the alley before the end of the week.

You know what they're doing now?

• Chicago has tried just about everything to control a burgeoning rat population fueled by a construction boom and a mild winter. None of it has worked in a city seemingly overrun by the rodents.
  
  Now, City Hall is trying something old and something new: A poison designed to make rats infertile, and dry-ice that produced promising results in parks and medians before the city was forced to stop the rat-suffocation experiment after learning the dry ice had not been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
  
  The poison is called Contrapest. It will be tested for six months at a waste transfer station at 34th and Lawndale, where 25 bait boxes will be installed, each equipped with feeding tubes that encourage rats to take poisonous bait.
  
  If it works as advertised — by rendering rats infertile unable to breed — the poison could become a “regular method used in other enclosed and contained areas” that serve as breeding grounds for rats.

Next up - fitting rats with tiny condoms and IUD's. It's the only humane way.