The "rat community" gets uptight

1,000 pet rodents euthanized; rat lovers furious

From San Francisco comes a story which uses political language in a context that just makes me giggle. (There's also a twist that no journalist could resist):

Rat lovers were furious Wednesday that a Petaluma animal shelter had euthanized more than 1,000 of the rodents taken last week from a man who had been hoarding the creatures inside his home.

Roger Dier, 67, was cited for misdemeanor animal cruelty last week after animal control officers found hordes of squealing rats inside his dingy one-bedroom house in Petaluma. Nancee Tavares, the city's Animal Services manager, had promised to find homes for as many rats as possible but admitted Wednesday that some 1,020 of them had to be put down. ...

Rat fanciers, who had formed an e-mail chain called "petalumarats" in an attempt to find homes for the rodents, were horrified. The shelter was bombarded Wednesday with angry phone calls and e-mails. Most members of the rat lobby felt they had been misled.

"This is an unspeakable injustice to those rats who deserved better," Phyllis Mason, a self-described rat lover, wrote in an e-mail. "Why didn't the Petaluma Animal Shelter give us a chance to help? ..."

Tina Bird, of Campbell, said the rat community was in the process of mobilizing when the rodents were killed.

"Maybe they would have been better advised to leave the animals in their horrible conditions until we, the rat community, had a few days to get moving," she wrote in an e-mail...

Now for the odd connection:

She said Dier, a convicted armed robber who first gained notoriety when his home in Southern California was used as a hideout for two men later convicted in the 1963 plot to kidnap the son and namesake of Rat Pack leader Frank Sinatra, didn't seem like a bad guy, just a bit troubled.

"He's an intelligent man to talk to, but he smells like rat urine," Tavares said.

There are photos to the story too, if ever you wanted to see the effects of having a thousand rats lose in your house. (The rats themselves are pretty cute, in my books.)