Posted on 12/17/2008 2:02:21 PM PST by NormsRevenge
A Berlin politician has come under fire for suggesting that poor people should be encouraged to catch rats by offering them €1 per dead rodent. The intriguing idea entails some gnawing practical problems and has been called "inhuman and cynical".
A job opportunity for Berlin's poor?
Picture the scene -- hundreds of poor people armed with clubs chasing rats through the streets of Berlin.
There's something Dickensian about the notion, but it has been proposed by a Berlin politician who is now being criticized for suggesting that the city's poor should be enlisted to tackle the growing rat infestation in the center of the German capital.
"Especially people who usually collect bottles could get one euro for every dead rat," Henner Schmidt, head of the business-friendly Free Democrat party in the Mitte district of Berlin, told Berliner Kurier newspaper this week.
The party may formally propose the scheme at a meeting of the district council on Thursday, unless it changes its mind in the wake of some damning criticism and negative media coverage.
"It's inhuman and cynical to send poor people out to chase rats so that Berlin can solve its rat problems," said the German Forum for People Without Income.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Is that why they called it the Rathaus in Munich?
When the poor get done in Berlin, send them to Washington DC.
I think Mao Tse-Tung got rid of rats that way. Flies, too. Don’t know if he paid off in the equivalent of Euros....
Supply me with the ammo and send me to a dump and I will do it for free.
Sounds like an incentive to start a secret rat farm. Could be quite profitable.
I thought I read somewhere that Europe was a socialist Utopia with no poverty or want?! How can the poor exist in such a Heaven-on-Earth?
We used to trap gophers as kids, didn’t make much tho, muskrats paid a lot better.
You got your welfare,, and then ya got your ratfare. Funny they didn’t come up with this in California first.
The world has gone crazy, period. The pests that brought them The Plague are protected. I suppose the rats could be turned in alive so they could be terminated via lethal injection.
And then the state picks up the health care costs for all those ankle bites : )
Yeah, don’t we always say one can have success if they “build a better mouse trap”? Mouse/rat? Who cares? Maybe that guy from Jethro Tull could sign up like the Pied Piper? Make a regular old hippie festival out of it. Ya gotta think outside the box a little here.
If the liberals are against it, then it must be a good idea. Liberals aren’t worried about the effects on poor people anyway, they are worried about the cute little defenseless rats.
After a week, Berliners would be raising rats to turn in for bounties.
Is this the guy that Harry Reid gets his lines from?
They could bring them to the opera and bore them to death.
After a week, Berliners would be raising rats to turn in for bounties.
LOLOL.
How dare someone suggest that the poor do something productive instead of just sitting around.
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