How Cities Are Using Dry Ice To Kill Rats (usatoday.com)

Some of the United States' biggest cities have resorted to using dry ice to kill rats. Since dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) turns into a gas, sanitation officials simply need to drop chunks of it into rat infested burrows and let science do the rest. Longtime Slashdot reader mi writes: USA Today reports: "Earlier this week, USA TODAY observed Chicago sanitation department workers at one of the city's oldest parks scoop chunks of smoking dry ice into a burrow before quickly covering the entry and exit holes with dirt and newspaper to stop any rats from escaping as the -109.3-degree Fahrenheit gas dissipated. Sanitation workers say they treat burrows during morning hours, when rats are less active and most likely to be huddled inside the burrows. The asphyxiated dead rats then decompose in place and out-of-sight of city denizens who count the disease-carrying vermin among the vilest of indignities of urban living. 'We are seeing 60% fewer burrows in areas where we are using the dry ice,' said Charles Williams, Chicago's streets and sanitation commissioner. 'It's more environmentally friendly, and it's very humane on the rodents as well.'" Humane or not, what is so especially "undignified" about rats? What makes them worse, than, for example, cats, deer or wild horses?

Comments

Rats are very clean animals.

[tlambert]

Rats are very clean animals.

Except, you know, for:

lymphocytic choriomeningitis
bubonic plague
typhus
hantavirus
leptospirosis
rat-bite fever (it's a real thing; look it up)
salmonellosis
Colorado tick fever
cutaneous leishmaniasis ...but except for those, VERY CLEAN!

Re:Very cruel

[Immerman]

House centipedes. The grey-brown kind with lots of long thin legs.

They're completely harmless to humans, even kinda cute for a bug, and are voracious predators against virtually all the home-infesting insects that we dislike, including termites, cockroaches and nigh-indestructible bedbugs. They can even become kind of friendly as they mature through their seven-year lifespan, if you're into befriending your "guard dogs".

I'm not above squishing particularly annoying bugs, but fostering a population of human-benign predators is far more effective, and controls potential infestations long before you even notice you've been invaded.