NYC’s Rat Czar Needs Much More Than ‘Killer Instinct’ to Succeed
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe Real Reason to Be Concerned About NYC’s Rat Problem. (It’s Not Disease.), Winning against rats isn’t about poison. It’s about people., NYC rat czar: What it will actually take to get rid of the rodents.
Everyone who sets foot in New York City seems to have a rat story. Rats have become so synonymous with the metropolis that a friend, visiting for the first time from Romania, was thrilled to see a New York subway rat. All part of the tourist experience. Lately though, it seems the rats have gone beyond creating atmosphere. From establishing new homes early in the COVID pandemic, rats have come surging back, enjoying the emphasis on outdoor dining.
NYC is not proud of this, and now has hired a new rat czar to take care of the problem. The fight began even before Kathleen Corradi was introduced as the new general in the rodent war, as New Yorkers received flyers informing them that soft trash bags couldn’t go out until 8 p.m., the idea being that if trash went out later, rats would have less time to chow down. Now, the new czar will work with rodent experts, pest control, and the department of sanitation to ‘send rats packing.’
In my reporting for my book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, I learned a lot about rats. My research suggests that Corradi faces an uphill battle. It’s not due to a lack of traps or poison. The anti-rat efforts are receiving an infusion of $3.5 million to pay for supplies like bait, traps, Rat Ice (basically a fancy name for dry ice), and fumigation machines, as well as waste-handling tools like tilt trucks. In the search for the rat czar, the job listing noted that the successful candidate must have a ‘killer instinct.’ But for a rat czar to be successful, they cannot just kill rats, or even make some light adjustments around trash management. They need to change people.
A lot of people think rats are disgusting. Maybe it’s the scuttling paws. The yellow teeth (reinforced with iron, which is why rats can chew through concrete given enough incentive). The hairless tails. But what really causes disgust is the idea of disease.
Rats can, of course, get us sick. Most people’s minds might immediately go to bubonic plague, the iconic disease that wreaked havoc on the 14th century (and a fair number of other centuries both before and after). But plague isn’t coming into the Lower East Side. No one in the city has had plague since 2002, when two people brought it from New Mexico when they came to the city on vacation. In the United States, if you want to avoid plague, the animals you should avoid aren’t New York City rats. Prairie dogs, ground squirrels, and other more cuddly wildlife are the main spreaders of the disease.
Rats can also be carriers other diseases, such as leptospirosis. This is a bacterial disease spread through rodent urine. NYC has had a recent uptick. Between 2006 and 2020, humans got only an average of three cases per year of leptospirosis, but in 2021, the city saw 15 cases. Severe illness from leptospirosis in humans is rare. On an average day, most people are far, far more likely to get COVID (or a cold, the flu, or anything else) from their co-workers than they are to get leptospirosis from the rats. Leptospirosis can also be a danger to dogs—who are generally much more enthusiastic about rat urine than humans. Luckily, dogs can be vaccinated against leptospirosis (if you have a dog, please do that!).
So, rat disease is just not all that much of an issue. Rats have another burden, though. With disgust comes fear and shame. Rats aren’t just rats. They are signs of chaos, disorder. Signs of a city that is gross and dirty. Because we think rats are so disgusting and scary, living with them has a psychological burden.
And the weight of living with rats falls only lightly on people sharing their rat stories with the New York Times. It falls more heavily on people living in truly rat-ridden housing—or on people with no housing at all. In public housing in places like the Bronx, rats got so bad they bit children—in 2018. In 2015, reports showed New York City homeless shelters overrun with rats. For my book, I spoke with people who were living unhoused. They told me stories of defending themselves against rats in the night with a BB gun. Live and dead rats peppered their encampments—even though they worked to keep the areas clean.
In studies of people living closely with rats in places like the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, the sound of rats robs them of sleep. Fear of contact with rats and the diseases they can spread is constant. So is frustration. People living in poor housing—or no housing—know they will be the last to feel the effects of any new rat initiative, if those initiatives make much of a difference at all.
Waiting to put trash bags out until 8 p.m., as New Yorkers have been doing since April 1, is sadly not going to make a difference. Rats are nocturnal and have no problem dining late. Other rat-focused efforts are likely to broadly fail as well. Traps and poison may work for small areas like a home. But deployed over a city, rats get wise to physical traps. They can also develop resistance to poisons. Scientists have developed stronger poisons, but all of them run the risk of poisoning other animals—like the red-tailed hawks dining on the rat buffet. Some burrows can be treated with dry ice to suffocate the rodents, and volunteers can bring their rat-hunting dogs out to follow their instincts—but people and dogs can only kill the rats they can find. Cats? Hah. Good luck.
Rats are a community problem, and one that requires a community solution. As urban rodentologist Michael Parsons notes, rats need three things—food, water, and shelter. Get rid of what rats need, and the population is going to go down.
Water is, honestly, beyond anyone’s control. It runs beneath the city, through sewers and pools and storm drains. Food and shelter, however, can be tackled, if the city has the will. Cutting back leafy undergrowth—where rats like to hide their burrows—can cut down on rat real estate in some areas. In buildings, traps and poison aren’t enough—holes need to be sealed.
But the biggest change needs to be in the garbage. For a rodent who can chew through concrete, the plastic of a trash bag on the sidewalk is just an appetizer. Hard-sided trash cans with tight-fitting lids go much further toward deterring rats (though if a rat sets its mind to the task, it can chew through most anything, short of metal, eventually). Better yet, the city could invest in a method known as containerization—large, metal containers that take up a parking space. People store trash in those containers until they can be picked up. In fact, the city tried a pilot of this method in Hell’s Kitchen. Photos show a sidewalk blissfully clear of trash. Residents said the rats disappeared.
But the city declared it a failure. Some bins can be emptied by automatic arms on garbage trucks; these had to be emptied by hand. Bags ended up outside the bins. That could be because residents didn’t use them properly, but it could also be that they weren’t emptied often enough. This is a problem that’s solvable with more labor and education. Department of Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch offered the comment that showed what was really at stake: If containerization were increased, she asked, where would people park?
There is no way to get rid of the rats without inconveniencing people. And maybe containerization is too much to ask. But at the very least, the city could avoid leaving bags of trash out all night to supply the rat buffet—people could at least put the trash out in the morning.
Yes, it’s a significant change to routine. But it’s a change everyone deserves, especially the most vulnerable residents of the city. Every New Yorker deserves to live in a place where the trash compactors work, where trash is collected frequently and sealed away from rats, and where walls aren’t full of rat-made holes.
Obviously these are changes people might not like. No one likes getting up early to take out the trash. No one likes less parking. People might not like higher taxes for new garbage trucks, and more sanitation workers to help empty cumbersome containers.
But it’s that or the rats.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/rat-czar-nyc-trash-poison-killer-instinct.html
Ref: slate
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