Montreal City Weblog

Kate 08:03 on 2022-06-29 Permalink Reply  

• Ephraim 09:47 on 2022-06-29 Permalink

  Usually a city has mice or rats, but not both… because the rats eat the mice. But I have rarely seen a rat in Montreal… but see mice all over the place, even running on the metro tracks. Where are people seeing these rats…. other than the CAC offices? 🙂

• walkerp 09:52 on 2022-06-29 Permalink

  That is weird, because I’ve never seen a rat in Montreal either. I don’t know what the ratio was in NYC when I was there, but they were quite visible, especially if you were out late.

• John B 09:52 on 2022-06-29 Permalink

  I’ve seen rats walking along in front of the apartments on my block of Verdun street, including my building.

  They apparently weren’t doing a great job of eating the mice, because I’ve also had mice in my building.

• MarcG 10:17 on 2022-06-29 Permalink

  There was a rat hanging around behind my place a few years ago and I’ve seen them scurrying around in vacant lots around town. But tons of mice, too, I think I’ve caught over 20 in the past few years.

• CE 11:20 on 2022-06-29 Permalink

  I can tell none of you have ever worked in a restaurant kitchen in Montreal. If you want to see rats, you’ll get plenty of them there.

  I’ve had mice and voles in various apartments around the city but usually have a cat living with me, so they generally don’t last long. I’ve never seen or heard of a rat in an apartment in Montreal.

• GC 12:52 on 2022-06-29 Permalink

  I had mice in my first apartment in Montreal and the Super told me the basement apartment had had a rat. I guess they were all living in harmony?

  I’ve seen plenty of mice in the metro, but the only time I actually saw rats here was when I cut through Place Emilie-Gamelin at night a few months ago. They were…not small. (Though I definitely saw bigger ones in Manhattan.)

• dhomas 15:22 on 2022-06-29 Permalink

  Due to some poorly done, DIY-type renovations, the last apartment I lived at in Rosemont had rats coming up from the sewers. I could hear them gnawing/clawing at the walls at night, and every so often they would find their way out and into the apartment. I never left any kind of food out on the counter or anything, because I was worried the rats might come for it. Eventually, the owners got it fixed, but it was kinda nasty for a while. Never saw another test after that sewer repair, though.
  At my new place, I will sometimes see what I think are deer mice. My cat will sometimes bring them home. Never seen a rat here, though.

• Kate 21:42 on 2022-06-29 Permalink

  GC, if anywhere in this city was going to have Rodents of Unusual Size, it would be that square.

  dhomas, that gnawing is horror movie-esque.

• dwgs 08:40 on 2022-06-30 Permalink

  Maybe 10 or 12 years ago a rat got into our house, still not sure how. The sewers had recently been redone on a nearby street, maybe that had something to do with it. Nothing quite like lying in bed hearing the thing scuttle around the house in the dead of night, debating whether to get up and chase it (thereby waking up and freaking out the whole family) or try to subtly let it know that you’re there and awake and hope it goes back into hiding. They’re too smart for traps, in the end I called an exterminator. Pro tip, save yourself a couple of hundred bucks and just go buy a lot of poison yourself and place it all over the house. Oh, and be prepared for the poisoned rat to stagger out into public, behaving very erratically and stage a very dramatic death scene. It’s not an experience I would recommend.

• Kate 12:19 on 2022-06-30 Permalink

  Sewer work can do it. A long time ago, a friend’s residential street was dug up for sewer replacement in NDG and their house became infested with rats. I don’t remember what they had to do about it, just how nasty it was for them.