Go ahead and suggest to Arianne Bennett that restaurants are to blame for the rat problem in Adams Morgan (check the link for Part I of our story, about a resident who blames the rats). Bennett, who owns the Amsterdam Falafelshop with her husband, Scott, has heard it before.

Bennett considers herself a civilian expert on the subject and, in fact, has been known to sign off on the Adams Morgan Listserv as “Constant Fighter of Rats in the Alley.”

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest Bennett does know from rats. First, there’s the “rat exclusionary work” she has personally overseen at her restaurant on 18th Street. Over here, the glue traps. There, the tracking powder. Rat fences line the patio, which is religiously hosed off with bleach or a similar cleaner; posted signs warn the falafel-eating masses to never feed pigeons (the rats with wings). Small holes, wherever they appear, are stuffed with steel wool; she finds some of them by crawling around in dark corners with a flashlight. Every crevice or potential crack in a basement wall she shares with an attached and abandoned building is pocked with spongey, yellow, non-rat-friendly Big Gap Filler. She uses the stuff on the outside cracks of her building and the one next door, as well. She has a professional “rat guy” who checks the place regularly; she knows how to direct-dial the District to get someone out pronto. She never leaves out open trash and patrols the alley to make sure her neighbors and fellow business-owners are similarly vigilant.

“I will stomp on a rat before I will allow it to come into my restaurant,” she says. And she has. It’s not pretty, she says.

If Bennett comes off as a touch more concerned about rats than your average restaurant owner, there’s a good reason. She and Scott and their two Italian mastiffs live upstairs; so if there’s a rat in the restaurant, there’s a rat in the house. They also park their vehicle in the alley by the Dumpsters and have, as has the star or Rat Tale Part I, dealt with rats chewing through their car parts. Bennett’s solution? Bleach. She hoses off the cement under her car every day. “It’s the food smell,” she says. “You have to get rid of that if you don’t want them under there.”

The Dumpsters, themselves, are unfixable, she says. There’s a gap built into their design that prevents the lids from slamming on people’s fingers. It’s a like putting out a welcome mat for rats to get in, she says. “Unless someone designs a better Dumpster that I can afford,” she says, she’ll have to live with it.

And don’t bother to publicly complain on Listservs and the like that the city needs to do more, as several people have done of late. “The old-timers are not surprised anymore,” she says.

“Unless you’re seeing a team of rats carrying a person down the street, you’re not going to get the attention of the District government,” she says. “It’s like trying to hold back a tide right at your front door.”

Like all of those scantily-clad, cocktail-loving kids from the suburbs, rats enjoy fun times in Adams Morgan. Talk of their antics burbles up every few months or so on the neighborhood listserv, as it did recently, when Sid Binks chimed in with a post titled, “RATS Everywhere.”

Binks, 44, has lived in Adams Morgan almost half his life. To the residents (many of them newbies) who think the rat problem has gotten worse, Binks says, maybe, but it’s relative. D.C. did have a mild winter and maybe some rat families that would have died off, didn’t. But rats have been part of the fabric of Adams Morgan for as long as he can remember.

There was the time about two years ago when his nearly new car, parked on a concrete slab behind his house on Calvert Street, wouldn’t start. He took it back to Chevy Chase Acura and was told he had a problem: Rats had eaten through the insulation surrounding his ignition wires and the wires shorted out. The mechanic had seen this sort of thing before and offered a solution. “They wrapped the part of the car where rats can get at it with steel wool.” He hasn’t had a problem since. (Current service manager at the dealership, Mike Wang, says he was not aware of this practice but was glad to know Binks is still able to start his car.)

“I’ve exposed rats’ nests. I’ve killed babies,” says Binks. “I’ve stuck a hose down a hole—and the holes are fairly extensive—and turned it on. If they pop out, I bash them with a shovel.”

He’s installed and replaced a “rat fence” around his wooden fence. It’s like chicken wire, he says, “but the holes are a lot smaller….Over the years, gaps do appear and they find their way in. Once you get one, well…”

On and off for 10 years, he’s fought rat infestaions on his patio. He’s never found them in the house, but has a friend who discovered one in the toilet. “He took a plunger and drowned it.”

Every morning, he hoses rat crap from the alley, where he and his neighbors are careful about their trash. He uses poison sparingly because of the neighborhood dogs. He does put out rat traps. “One time one of those closed on my thumb and broke a blood vessel. You should have seen it,” he says.

“I’ve been at this a long time,” says Binks, and it’s given him some perspective. “I don’t like the whole thing, but I guess what you can say is that I’ve accepted it. It’s part of city living.”

(photograph by yours truly, taken many months ago outside Binks’ house on my way to work)

Early this winter, a woman from Southeast called me nearly every week to leave long rambling messages about a rat story I should be writing. I didn’t want to write her particular rat story, because I’d already written a fair amount about rats in another piece published a few weeks before. This city offers a bottomless pit of rat stories–just layers upon layers of rats and the people that despise them, on and on forever. Sometimes, you got to say “No. No more. This week, I’d like to write about graffiti.”

But anyway, I lead with that tale because I’d like to recommend a rat story. The June 2008 issue of Reason features an editorial by Editor-in-Chief Matt Welch called “City of Rats” examining how, to quote Welch directly, “Thinking Big’ at the municipal level means abandoning the basics.” In short: city officials would rather lavish millions on a baseball stadium than fix our eternally backward and broken city agencies.

This is old news to us locals. But, Welch’s piece succinctly illuminates exactly how we continue to suffer as politicians choose flashiness over functional government.

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Gerald Brown has been a rat abatement expert for 25 years. He worked the pest control beat with a private company. And then transferred to the Department of Health where he works as the program manager for the “Rodent and Vector Control Division.”

Brown knows his rodents. I wanted to talk to him about my story on William Selepack. Selepack had claimed to have captured and killed 50 rodents in his apartment.

“The most I’ve seen, that we’ve captured in a commericial business—not a home—was like 12,” Brown says. “That’s not a regular occurrence. I have not seen his unit. But I imagine it’s more units above and below and beside. If there was that many rodents, mice or rats, someone else would have noticed.”

What abatement steps should Selepack take? “If it’s a large infestation, [then do] what they call a cleanout. They would set a lot of traps for quick kills then they would leave bait boxes with poison…The goal would be to kill as many as fast as you could. If it was a large infestation, you could in two days, if you set enough traps, you could capture most of them.”

Brown goes on: “You need a food source to support a rat infestation. If they don’t have enough food, it’s not going to be a real, real problem. That’s why they are there. They are there for food. If he has a dog, if a dog is pooping….We recommend that you clean your dog’s poop outside, inside. That could be food for rodents.…In our literature, we tell people to clean up [their poop] as quickly as possible.”

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