Democrats Want to Save the Rats

Los Angeles isn’t the city of angels: it’s the city of rats. 

By Daniel Greenfield  @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 Last year, LA shot up in the rankings of the “rattiest cities” from third to second place, and it’s closing in fast on Chicago. What is its secret? There is the fetid filth of the junkie vagrant camps where typhus, a medieval disease spread by rats, made a comeback almost as fast as crime once city officials legalized the ‘homeless’ trifecta of street living, drug use and shoplifting.

And like criminals and junkies, the rats have Democrats on their side.

In the fall of last year, Gov. Newsom signed into law a bill that banned more forms of rat poison after a previous rat poison ban in 2020. Newsom and other advocates for taking Los Angeles back to the rats pretended that the rat poison bans were about protecting mountain lions, but then two California Democrats put forward a bill that exposed the real ‘rats rights’ agenda.

Rep Ted Lieu of LA and Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank introduced the Glue Trap Prohibition Act which bans glue traps because they’re cruel to rats. It’s understandable that Lieu and Schiff would feel for the suffering of their fellow rattus americanus and Lieu moans that glue traps are “among the cruelest ways to eliminate rodents”. (The least cruel is electing them to Congress.)

Rep. Lieu serves on the advisory council of Democrats for the Protection of Animals which campaigns against eating turkeys on Thanksgiving, pony rides for children and glue traps for rats. So expect a congressional bill on banning turkey sandwiches and pony rides up next.

Rep. Lieu agonizes that rats in glue traps “that do not escape die of blood loss, suffocation, or dehydration.” He didn’t bother listing the symptoms of hantavirus, for which there is no known cure, typhus or the bubonic plague: among the rat borne diseases making a comeback.

But while Rep. Lieu cares about the suffering of rats, he doesn’t care about human suffering.

It’s already illegal in California to remove rats from your property. If you trap a rat, you either have to “euthanize” it on the spot or let it go. And rats rights activists are campaigning to expand the ban on ‘trapping’ larger animals like coyotes to also apply to rats which, between the bans on effective varieties of rat poisons and glue traps, would make it impossible to stop the rats.

West Hollywood, an LA County “city” of 16 blocks at its tallest and 5 blocks at its shortest, where PETA has a great deal of influence, led the way in banning glue traps within the 5 supermarkets in its borders forcing residents to drive 3 minutes extra to the Ralphs on Sunset Boulevard, and what goes in West Hollywood must now also be imposed on all of America by Rep. Lieu.

Rather than kindness to animals, LA’s love of rats began killing man’s best friend. Ever since Los Angeles began cracking down on rat control measures, dogs began sickening. Leptospirosis, one of the diseases spread through the waste of Rep. Lieu’s best rat friends, caused an epidemic among dogs in the county.

“It’s the rats,” Dr. Alan Schulman, a veterinary surgeon, explained. “They urinate places, they defecate places, dogs get it from them.”

Given a choice between protecting rats and killing dogs, Democrats killed the dogs.

But in New York City, Democrats went one better, killing people to protect rats.

In 2021, former ACORN boss Bertha Lewis pushed through a ban on rat poison. Leptospirosis cases jumped from 57 in 14 years to 15 in just one year. Over a dozen New Yorkers contracted leptospirosis and suffered from liver and kidney failure. One of them died. The symptoms of include fever, aches, and jaundice. Even those who survive can end up with brain damage.

But at least New York City Democrats had banned cruelty to rats and killed people and dogs.

Rather than end the ban on rat poison, Mayor Eric Adams appointed a Department of Education bureaucrat “rat czar” at a salary of $155,000 a year.

“Rats are smart, they are resilient,” Mayor Adams argued. “Many of us live in communities where rats think they run the city.”

Since the rat poison ban remains in place, rats actually do run the city. When people suffer and die for the convenience of rats, it’s not a human government, it’s a government of rats.

The New York Post warned that, “rats as big as bunnies are roaming the streets in broad daylight, nesting in trees and chewing through car engine wires”

Mayor Bill de Blasio, his predecessor, had tried to demonstrate that there was no need for rat poison by dumping dry ice on rat nests, only to have a rat run right through his demonstration. $30 million was spent when thousands of dollars spent on rat poison would have done the job.

Without rat poison or traps, state and city governments dump the burden on property owners to practice what they call “prevention and exclusion” by sealing everything. But as everyone who has dealt with rats knows, they’re smart and, like leftists, can sneak in through the smallest crack and, also like leftists, once they get inside, it takes determined efforts to get rid of them.

Especially if, like leftists, you can’t put out a glue trap with a copy of Das Kapital, then release them in their natural habitat of Cuba or North Korea, and count the problem over and done with.

From New York City to Los Angeles to Vancouver to San Francisco, rat poison bans led to explosions in the rat population. And the Democrats pretended they had nothing to do with it.

Democrats have been running out of victim groups to protect, and they were bound to eventually turn to rats. Not only can’t you spell ‘Democrats’ without “rats’, but the rattiest cities in America are Democrat enclaves. Now the Democrats and the rats are finally teaming up.

So far no Democrat has figured out how to get them to vote, but give them time.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.