![]() But were there more of them or was I just seeing more of them? The answer turned out to be a little bit of both. I felt fairly certain that I’d never seen so many rats in New York. One day, I attempted to toss a doggy bag into a trash can and made hand-to-paw contact. Rats were nesting in car engines, popping up in toilets, grazing legs at outdoor eateries. It turned out that my whole neighborhood was besieged. I prohibited trash in the yard I stomped burrows I sprayed mint oil I called exterminators. This drove the rats to the surface, where they turned my backyard paradise into a subway platform. No sooner had I gotten the yard sorted out than a construction project broke ground next door. My apartment is on the border of Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, an area deep in the throes of gentrification and not too far from the mayor’s rental property. I tricked out the tiny backyard: tables, chairs, lounge furniture, sun umbrellas, daffodils, roses, hydrangea bushes-everything that would make someone want to spend every possible moment that they could outside, which was exactly what I planned to do. Not just any apartment, a garden apartment. I’m somewhat familiar with this phenomenon. ![]() Studies have found that people living near infestations are more likely to report feeling anxious or depressed. ![]() In November, researchers discovered several COVID-19 variants in sewer rats, opening up a whole new range of concerns. In 2021, 14 New Yorkers were diagnosed with the disease and one died of it-far more cases than in any previous year. In New York City, cases of leptospirosis-a bacterial infection that can lead to kidney and liver failure and that is predominantly transmitted in rat urine-are on the rise. Rats are gross, but they can also be dangerous. Over the past half century, changes in climate and the way New Yorkers dispose of their trash have given the rat population an unprecedented opportunity to boom, an increase unabated by man and undeterred by politics. And although dining sheds may be the easiest of scapegoats, they are the least of our problems. ![]() Empty offices and barren subways forced rats aboveground to forage by our dining sheds.īut Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat, has been in America for about 250 years. Rats long dwelled in or near the city’s subways, where sloppy commuters and takeout restaurants provided a reliable food source. The coronavirus pandemic certainly brought more rats into our peripheral vision. A few weeks ago, the mayor himself had to pay a $300 fine for failing to control rats at a rowhouse he rents out to tenants. (A brilliant idea, I thought I had, after all, suggested that he take such action in an open letter.) Yet, three months later, the position still hasn’t been filled. In December, Mayor Eric Adams posted, with great fanfare, a job announcement: The city was looking for a “highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty” candidate to take on the newly restored position of rat czar. What we do know is that recorded rat sightings in New York are at an all-time high. The question we don’t know is: Is it 20 percent more rats? Is it 36.6 percent? Empirically, we’ll probably never get that answer.” “When I put that trifecta together,” he told me, “there are more rats. When I told him about my exterminating experience, he said, with some delight, “So, you speak the language.” A slight man with graying hair and an accent that would have been at home at my family’s dinner table, he has been studying rodents since he took a job as an exterminator, installing baits in the city sewer system, to put himself through college back in the late 1970s.įor a decade, Corrigan has been sending out surveys to pest-control professionals around the city, asking questions such as “Have rat calls gone up each year?” Corrigan also looks at rat sightings and the number of restaurants failing health inspections. Xochitl Gonzalez: Mayor Adams, we need a rat czarĪbout a month ago I Zoomed with Robert Corrigan, a fellow Brooklynite and one of the world’s foremost rodentologists. Little did I know that across the city, tunneling below my feet, one of those creatures was-litter by litter-besting man. Back in that storefront in Flatlands, I believed that pests of all kinds could be controlled. I dispatched crews to dismantle hornet nests, helped identify mysterious bugs in Ziploc bags, and fielded panicked calls about animals-raccoons, squirrels, mice, and, of course, rats-being where animals shouldn’t be. Every Saturday morning when I was in high school, I would take two buses across Brooklyn to my cousin’s exterminating business, where I worked the front desk.
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