August 30,2017
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Waldwick NJ, Wanamaker Avenue, a middle-class neighborhood that according to residents has recently become infested with rats. After finding them all over their property some Waldwick residents say rats are taking over their neighborhood.
According to neighbors the first signs of the rats was in the spring, since then, the issue has begun to tailspin, with more and more neighbors reporting sightings of the animals, both dead and alive. Some have even set traps.
Residents claim the sudden invasion started with nearby construction of Waldwick Station a Russo Development and Terminal Construction Corporation project that began building an 111-unit apartment complex on Zazzetti Street, along the NJ Transit rail, last summer .
Get a neighborhood cat.
Problem solved.
Finally, a use for Habernickel Park…
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A nice staging area until the low income housing and Ginormous Garage are built.
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Waldwick needs to take this problem much more seriously, for as great as this original infiltration was, it is highly likely that it will get much worse and infinitely more dangerous as the colder months force them to take even more residence in homes. Rats carry all kinds of disease and are notoriously rabid. Their urine and feces leave disease-borne microbes everywhere, including in air ducts, children play areas and other areas where it becomes an incessant threat to human health, young and old alike! Rats are very adaptable and are very opportunistic, not to mention, their prolifate reproductive rate. A female can breed at 5 weeks-old, gestation is only 21 days, liters can be as high as14, or more simply put, 2 rats can become as much as 15,000 in less than a year.
These rats being dislocated from there past community now probably means the threat they represent has grown 100-fold, as did the chance of ever reducing the threat to what was once manageable to the neighbor hoods in Waldwick. I wish these citizens my hopes and prayers in dealing with a potentially tragic problem for their beautiful community.
Yes cat, would work great ,yummy
Rats DO NOT carry rabies,
https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/exposure/animals/other.htmlJul 5, 2017 – Small rodents and other wild animals. Small rodents like squirrels, hamsters, guinea pigs, gerbils, chipmunks, rats, and mice) and lagomorphs including rabbits and hares are almost never found to be infected with rabies and have not been known to transmit rabies to humans.
I stand corrected. I was mislead by an animal control expert I had a conversation regarding the dilemma of feeding feral cats. She had said that compassionate urge to want to help the feral felines, especially in the icy months when food for them is either scarce or non-existent, needs to be measured against to the possibility of contamination of the food from other wild animals, which may be carriers of saliva-borne rabies. I could have sworn she had mentioned rats on that list, but possibly she meant to say raccoons. Where I am, I would bet that we may very well have more resident raccoons than rats, and I definitely know raccoons succumb to and carry the rabies virus. I’ve seen it first-hand.
Regardless, these vermin need to be dealt with immediately! Nothing good ever comes from living amongst hundreds, potentially thousands, of rats. If by chance you know, or perhaps come across, a Vietnam War Veteran who served in outposts such as Khe Sahn, they definitely could shed more light on the subject. For what its worth, I apologize to the rats I may have offended.