Farmer's Market Parking Lots / Creepy Mice/Rats & Homeless

The sightings of mice and rats is a good reason the city should finally adopt TNR or Trap Neuter and Release as its official policy on dealing with stray cats. Cats are natural hunters, and will control the population of mice and rats in a natural way. Unfortunately, there is no political leadership on this issue. The City has a policy of not feeding stray cats, but then says it backs TNR. Well, you can't have both. Please call your Councilperson and ask why there is no TNR program (official) throughout the City. It's a win/win for everyone except perhaps the mice. Meow.

Please do not suggest the Farmers' Market is anyway involved with this problem. We clean the entire lot including all the bushes every week.

There are a few people in the community that put bread in the lot along with water for the ducks. They think the ducks can not find food on their own. I have repeatedly told them this is a health problem. They don't care - the ducks come first.

With respect to the bushes, please do NOT ask the city to remove them or for that matter cut them down. All that is nice about this parking lot is the landscaping. Without it the homeless crap would be on the ground and blowing into the street.

We like our GREEN environment and don't have rodent problems - its the humans that feed them that are the problem!

James Murez
Market Manager

It sounds like you saw a possum (or, more correctly: opossum) - kind of shaped like a very big mouse, with a relatively short tail compared to that of a rat, but related to neither. They're North America's only marsupial. While possum don't exactly abound in Venice, they are longtime residents; we see them scurry (if you can call it scurrying) across yards and alleys, and under houses. They're nocturnal, and they're transient; the possum you see in your yard on Tuesday is highly unlikely to be there through Friday - and will leave much earlier if you simply make your presence known.

Possum look grosser, and sound nastier, than they are; they don't like the public arena, but might stand their ground and bare their teeth when they don't think they can safely lumber away, not knowing that we don't want to catch and eat them. When extremely scared, they might "play possum" - for up to 4 hours. While they enjoy fruit (preferably the over-ripe kind after it falls to the ground), they eat pests such as snails, slugs, spiders, cockroaches, rats, mice and snakes.

I don't know what cats think about possum, but I imagine that they'd either try to use them as toys or stay away from them based on their similar size.

From wikipedia: "As a native species in Australia, possums are protected by Australian regulations, even when they reside in urban neighbourhoods, and cannot be baited. They cannot be killed as pests, and if captured, the regulations stipulate that they must be released within a small radius of that locality since they are territorial creatures. Preventative measures such as blocking off their access to the roof spaces or building a possum nesting box for an alternative home are instead recommended."