Agrippa said:
The footage is quite something. There's no way that particular franchise is going to survive!
Well maybe not that particualr location. But the franchise will go on.
Believe it or not rats are so common in NYC that most people won't even be fazed by this.
We see them everyday on the subway. If you're out at night in certain city parks you'll see them, too.
It's an accepted part of life. One-time former mayor Rudy Guilliani claimed that he was going to rid NYC of all the rats and people just laughed. He had already succeeded in seriously diminishing the influence of 'the family' in NYC both as mayor and as a District Attorney. But at that point he was ridiculed as trying to be "The Pied Piper" because it's just an impossible task.
There's just no way you can get rid of the rats. It's just a biological fact that an urban environment in a temparate climate is an ideal breeding ground. This is a fact of life since the first major cities developed in Europe way back in the middle ages. Rats have long been known to plague most major seaports and easily travel around the globe by ship.
Even if you could kill every rat on the island of Manhattan, everyday trucks, ships, and planes from around the world arrive here with all sorts of unwanted guests. Not to mention the fact that the "island" loses it's advantage of invulnerablity because it is connected to everything else by transportation and utilities to everything around it - both above & below ground! So if you get rid of all of them it would only make room for a fresh batch to move in.
The only thing to do is to control the population at a manageable, acceptable level. Even the finest restaurants & greatest hotels in NYC have them (as well as cockroaches, too); the only difference is that "nice" places spend enough on extermination to keep them from being quite as noticable as what you see in the place that this news story demonstrates.
The human race was nurtured in caves and still managed to survive & thrive so it's not necessarily a 'life-threatening' situation. As long as there's enough garbage to eat they won't come after us at least
P.S. - The species of rat that's most common is fairly harmless as long as they're not threatened or if an area isn't totally infested & over-populated. The one's that are really scary are actually the size of cats - it's no 'urban legend'! If you "google" the name of the species 'Rattus Norvegicus' you'll see what I mean. They're big!
Indigenous to Northern Europe, they came here in the 19th century by boat along with cargo & immigrants and they are alive & well here in NYC.
These guys even give me the "heebie-jeebies"
I mean a good-sized, regular, grey rat (species 'Rattus rattus' for you scientist-types) might be the size of an otter or a ferret, say. At least you can stomp on that!
But the big ones really are as big as house cats and I hear they can be very aggressive. Not something to you'd want to meet in a dark alley at night - or your local fast food joint at lunch time!
Last summer I worked for a company that owned an old building from the mid-1800's; when the ConEd utility crews came to read the electric meter in the basement, they always sent two guys as a team because no one would go in the basement alone - no joke!
