Chicago’s rats are a brazen, shameless group, as likely to stare back at you as they are to scurry away underneath that alley mattress.
Every Chicagoan breathes a little easier when they see the Streets and Sanitation Department’s yellow, ever-present “Target: Rats” signs advertising that their neighborhood vermin are about to get poisoned.
Bill Healy was walking home from dinner Tuesday night near North Wolcott and West North avenues in Bucktown when he thought he saw one of those signs heralding the end for area rodents.
But a closer inspection revealed that the sign actually read “Target: Bums.”
Instead of an angry, teeth-baring rat in the crosshairs, the sign showed an angry homeless man, surrounded by booze bottles, with his own fierce rat coiled next to him.
Instead of offering ways to avoid rats and the poison, the replica poster advises passers-by that “bum bait” has been placed in areas “where bums can find it.”
“Don’t pick up any full liquor bottles,” it advises. “If you suspect the bait has been ingested by a real person or pet, immediately contact your doctor or funeral director.”
The poster also calls for people to “stop enabling the bums!” by keeping all handouts in pockets, properly disposing of cardboard boxes, returning shopping carts from whence they came and not giving homeless people a free meal.
“Bums can cause guilt,” the poster reads. “Avoid eye contact.”
Healy, 31, said he had just seen a rat peeking out of a garbage bin, “at eye level,” before he came across the knockoff poster.
“It was kind of disbelief,” the journalist said of his reaction to the anti-bum sign. “It was like, really?”
Healy, who has worked on media projects chronicling the city’s homeless, said he was angered by the fact that someone would put up something that dehumanizes the city’s homeless population — not to mention the calories burned and hours wasted on such an endeavor.
“Obviously, it’s some kind of joke, or someone’s idea of a joke,” he said. “Who has that kind of time? Why would you spend your time doing this?”
Streets and Sanitation spokeswoman Molly Poppe said that the department was informed of the knockoff poster Wednesday and that it has not seen similar signs pop up elsewhere.
Poppe said crews were made aware of the signs and told to take down any they see.
“We will remove any signs or language that is on the public way that is offensive,” she said. “And this sign is offensive.”
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