Palisades Rathouse: Unchallenged by Health Officials, Elderly Twins Fed Local Vermin Population
Old ladies lovingly nurtured rats, turning a home in one of the nation's priciest enclaves into Willard
Had Denham been given more than the time of day that night, he would have told them a tale beyond belief about one of the richest enclaves in the United States. His sweet old neighbor ladies, identical twins, had spent years fanatically feeding the Palisades’ rat population. Although the full dimensions of the environmental and health damage done by the peculiar pair are unknown, experts contacted by L.A. Weekly estimate that the ladies’ actions may have added tens of thousands, even 500,000, new rats to L.A.’s Westside.
Chris Conlan, a longtime inspector with San Diego County Vector Control, says, “That number could be monstrous. You could get numbers approaching hundreds of thousands of rats. It’s impossible to quantify.” The case gives pause to the seen-everything-twice Animal Care and Control department in New York. “That’s definitely one for the books for us!” declares Richard Gentles, of that city’s huge animal-control bureaucracy. “This is the first time I’ve heard of someone living with that many rats. We don’t have problems to that level.”
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Otto offered to front the extensive renovation costs if the sisters would sign papers transferring their $1.2 million property to a trust he would inherit once they died. The sisters say they took the offer, reluctantly. It was far more important to Marjorie and Margaret that they continue to do the lord’s work, hastening the second coming of Christ one rat at a time. Marjorie says shetold Liz, “If you’re afraid of a few rats, read the Book of Revelation.”
Nobody who knows the Barthels — not their nephew Jeff Luks, to whom the Weekly spoke, not friend Rene Robinson, not their former lawyer, Adam Rossman — can say what strain of Christianity they follow. Perhaps just a really paradoxical interpretation of the Though Shalt Not Kill commandment. (Paradoxical because the sisters aren’t vegetarians. They love chicken.)
<snip>
“Since 1958, we’ve had rats,” Marjorie told Barak Lurie during her deposition in May. “I’ve lived with rats since 1958, honey.... When I got the house in <1958>, that’s the day I started feeding all the animals. And I fed them as long as I lived there.”
http://www.laweekly.com/news/features/palisades-rathouse-unchallenged-by-health-officials-elderly-twins-fed-local-vermin-population/19342/?page=allThis is an amazing and disgusting story. I once again thought "The Onion" had printed it. It highlights what
a combination of government inaction, misplaced animal love, senility, and misguided religious beliefs can bring
about. It is a long read, but a jawdropping one. :wtf:
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