I’d just to start things off by saying that the amount of enjoyment my last post seems to have generated is absolutely amazing. I want to thank everyone who liked and commented on the last installment. I hope things go well for each and every one of you.
Name: Lucas Treadray
Age: 31
Occupation: Chicago Parks Department, South Side administrator
Wanna know how the megaherd started? A perfect storm that’s how. All the right factors coming into play at just the right time.
The break in at the Hasbio facility upstate made the news pretty quickly. The fact that they’d genetically engineered the newest bestselling children’s toy was amazing, even if the fuckin’ defective versions were let loose by those PETA lunatics.
Oh man, if we had any idea how much trouble those things would be.
The city government estimates that there were five hundred fluffies in the original group that made their way from the Hasbio facility into Chicago. Hasbio says that the original number held at the facility was about four and a half thousand and that this group would be culled once the ‘errors’ were corrected in subsequent versions. So far as I know, the rest of the shitrats fled in other directions from the group that made their way to Chicago.
The domestic ones weren’t an issue, it was the fucking ferals. Even though there wasn’t quite a ton of them, there were still more than enough to be a nuisance. They’d go up to random people asking to be adopted or if they had any food. They were a tripping hazard like nothing you’d believe. The number of people in hospital waiting rooms waiting to be treated for injuries that came from tripping on the little shits is just phenomenal. People’d be walking out of their apartments or busses, bump into the furry fucks and eat pavement. Not to mention the fact that those things shit like nothing on Earth.
They did provide the homeless population with more food though. We saw a pretty sharp dive in the number of calls about hobos going through peoples trash. One of them put together a cookbook on how to prepare fluffy. Let me tell ya, the money that guy’s rolling is enough to make sure he stays off the streets for good.
When we pressed Hasbio for help with the situation they just waved their hands and said the ferals would be sorted before long. “They’ve got almost no survival instinct,” they said “they’ve got no clue how to survive without being cared for by someone else,” they said. “The winter will kill off the ferals.” And when I first heard the press conference where Hasbio’s representatives said that, I believed them. Chicago can get cold during the winter. It can get fucking freezing come January. We all thought the little suckers would just freeze to death or move somewhere warmer. All that’d be left would be the domestic ones.
I’d seen ferals wandering around streets and back alleys with scars looking like they hadn’t eaten well in weeks. They begged whoever walked past for food, either for themselves, their ‘babbehs’ or their ‘bestest babbeh.’ That last one is what made a lot of people turn into fluffy haters. A mare asked my girlfriend for some food so she could feed her favorite foal. When she asked about the shivering brown colored foal next to her, the mare just puffed out her cheeks and said “nu, poopie babbeh onwy noms poopsies!” The bitch didn’t even care when my girlfriend took the ‘poopy babbeh’ from her. She named him Dennis and he still lives with her. Best behaved fluffy I’ve ever seen.
To sum it up, I thought the ferals would’ve been decimated by the time March rolled around. They’d have dropped to a low enough number that animal control and ‘volunteers’ could wipe out the survivors.
But no matter the time of year, no matter the weather, people still throw out food. You toss out that half eaten chicken leg from two days ago. Mcdonalds fills dumpsters with trash bags full of wasted burgers, fries and whatever. Even the fancy as shit French and Italian places have food to throw out. Everybody from crummy hole-in-the-wall burger joints to five star restaurants and your average city dweller was tossing food in the garbage.
And let me ask you this: what do you think happened when the furry fucks started going through our trash? What do you think they found?
They didn’t die off. They weren’t culled by the winter.
They fucking thrived. They found shelter and enough food to ensure that almost every fluffy made it through. And more importantly, that almost every single ‘babbeh’ born during the winter months survived to maturity. Sexual maturity, that is.
It took us a while to figure out exactly what was going on. We still saw the fuckers every once in a while and we even saw some with foals.
We didn’t realize the scale of the situation until mid February. A pair of graffiti artists were working in Lincoln Park for a community service sentence when they and their custody officer heard babbling from a particularly dense part of the forest. They followed the sound to a large hollow and you know what they found? A herd of shitrats, a huge one. The herd noticed the trio when one of the grafitti artists stepped on a branch but didn’t run. And it’s a good thing they didn’t because when animal control finished culling the group they determined that the herd had a size of just over 230. Mares, foals, smarties, toughies, stallions, you name it. And they weren’t gorging on grass and bark either. Animal control found half eaten pizza slices, old take out boxes, pieces of fruit and who knows what else.
Then we started hearing about the nests. Alleyways near restaurants with over twenty fluffies living in them. Abandoned buildings sheltering herds with dozens of members at the least. Sewer workers were finding fluffy dens in alcoves or near access tunnels. We got six reports from homeless people about nest locations in one day, all of them legitimate. For fucks sake we even found a nesting site under Wrigley Field! Right under the stadium!
The number of nesting sites we found with over fifty fluffies living in them told us that what Hasbio said just wasn’t true. Animal control was being run ragged halfway through winter. We started talking with the sanitation department about the food waste issue but we couldn’t find a sufficient solution. And I don’t mean that we were constantly butting heads over jurisdiction and responsibilities. There was no way we could cut the feral’s access to the enormous food supply we unintentionally provided them, not at that point and not to any meaningful extent. All we could do was estimate how many ferals we’d have to deal with come springtime.
We had to consider a number of variables to even try estimating how many of the shitrats that’d be running around Chicago once spring came: the amount of food waste the city was producing and the rate at which it was being produced, the number of nesting sites and with populations of over 50, the number of foals found at each site, the locations of these nesting areas and their proximity to reliable sources of food and water. The mayor herself attended the meeting along with the chief of police.
It was estimated that by mid-spring there would be over 70,000 feral fluffies on the streets of Chicago. That number would reach 120,000 once the ferals born during the winter had foals of their own.
It was clear that there was no way we could make a dent in the amount of food the fluffiest had access too. If we couldn’t cut down on their food supply, we’d whittle down the number of mouths as much as possible. The city organized volunteer kill teams to help reduce the stress Animal Control was dealing with. Some were composed of homeless people who were allowed to use any of the fluffies they killed for food, a few misdemeanor offenders who’d have their records expunged in exchange for their service. The rest of the volunteers were just your everyday citizen. We also started lacing the contents of trash bags with bug and rat poison. We were getting thousands of confirmed fluffy deaths each day.
But all that was just a drop in the bucket. The worst was yet to come.