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You got rats on the West Side
Bedbugs uptown
What a mess, this town's in tatters
I've been shattered
"Shattered" by The Rolling Stones (1978)
The first time, it was baguettes. Or rather, the gnawed remnants of a baguette. The baguette crumbs and some suspicious-looking dark pellets were on a belt inside the engine of Ken Peterson's minivan as it parked on a street in Harlem. The car's battery had died and Peterson had opened the hood to boost it.
The second time he opened the hood, he saw chicken bones lodged in the engine.
The third time, he caught the suspect in the act. It was just what he had feared. A rat, which immediately skittered away deeper into the bowels of the vehicle's engine.
"That," he recounted, "was really disgusting."
Peterson got off relatively easy. Rats got into my friend Maria's car, also parked on the street, and did more than just leave behind meal debris. Her car wouldn't start. She had it towed to a mechanic. The mechanic's report read: "Rats are going into your engine compartment and they chew the harness for the outside temp sensor. Need to repair the harness." It cost more than $700 to repair.
One night this past winter, I was sitting in the outside curbside dining area of a neighborhood bar. These sheds, as they're called, are perhaps the one good thing to come out of the Covid pandemic. There are now 12,000 in New York City. They are hugely popular. With both people and vermin.
As I drank a beer beneath the heat lamp, I caught a motion out of the corner of my eye, then something dark and fast streaked by beneath my legs. I jumped up. The waitress walked out just then carrying a tray of drinks for the people at another table.
"A rat just ran under my legs," I cried out.
Without breaking stride, she said evenly, "Lucky you."
Photo credit: Getty Images
Rats are taking over New York City. Okay, I am exaggerating intentionally to make a point. The point is the situation is bad. I have lived in this city more than 30 years -- in the "bad old days" of the late 1970s and 1980s, plus my second tour which began in 2006 -- and I cannot recall seeing as many rats as I have in the last two years, coinciding with the Covid pandemic.
The New York Times reported that there had been 21,000 complaints to the city's 311 line as of early November last year. That compared to 15,000 in the same period of the pre-pandemic year, 2019. Patch.com cited figures that show a surge in complaints last year that peaked at 2,698 last October -- a 74% increase over October 2020. Rat complaints in January and February 2022 were up 50% and 42% respectively over the same months in 2020.
A friend who is an avid bicyclist told me, "I’ve lived in New York City for thirty years and I’ve never seen the number of rats I’ve seen in the last year or two. In pairs running along Columbus Avenue, midday on a sidewalk on Park Avenue in the 80s, flattened in the streets everywhere."
Brooklyn resident Kemba Dunham told Patch that the situation is so dire in her neighborhood that she's fearful of going outside.
"I'm essentially a prisoner in my own home," she said.
Like Winston Smith in Orwell's classic Orwell dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (spoiler alert: Smith's totalitarian state torturers break him by exploiting his fear of rats), I am seriously revulsed by the sight of wild city rats scampering about the streets, sidewalks and subways. It's awful. Even worse are all the flat rats in the street -- victims of hit-and-runs by motorists. On the other hand, Peterson is heartened by the sight of the squished remains.
"Every time I see a flat one, you know what I think?" he told me. "Good!' It's gross, but that's good gross. Seeing them alive and vital, that's really gross to me."
On its website, The Humane Society of the United States, says, "Rats are considered carriers or transmitters of more human diseases than any other life form, except for maybe the mosquito. More than 15,000 rat bites are reported each year in the United States."
No one knows how many rats there are in New York City. I repeatedly came across the figure of two million. But who really knows? There's no rat census. But almost any New Yorker you talk to will tell you rats seem to be a lot more visible, more ubiquitous and bolder than ever, and that this rat surge can be traced back to March 2020 when the city was essentially shut down in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
There are plenty of theories connecting the rat explosion to the pandemic. One is that when thousands of restaurants closed, rats, who tend to hang out by restaurants to eat the garbage that's stacked outside, were suddenly deprived of their regular feeding at their regular hangout. In desperation, they wandered farther afield in search of nourishment. The sidewalk dining that began when indoor dining was still prohibited has only expanded their feasting opportunities.
During the pandemic, street cleaning and garbage collection were cut back, too. It was common to see Himalayan stacks of plastic garbage bags lining streets awaiting collection. On more occasions that I care to think about, the brown furry critters came sprinting out of a pile of refuse and crossed shockingly close to me.
The New York Times cited city health officials who attributed the rat rise to a wetter-than-usual summer.
Another theory pins some of the blame on the resumption of construction projects. The activity -- banging, churning, knocking down structures -- disturbs their nests which sends them fleeing into the streets, according to this hypothesis.
Some people are fighting back. For years, a guy named Manuel Rodriguez has been bashing rats in his Upper West Side neighborhood with a baseball bat, earning him the nickname MRod. Last fall, he set a personal record by grand slamming 15 rats in one evening.
Then, there's R.A.T.S. -- the Ryder's Alley Trencher-fed Society -- a kind of vigilante force that's been around since 1995. R.A.T.S. uses dogs -- terriers and dachshunds -- to flush out and assassinate rats all over the city.
Photo from R.A.T.S. Facebook page
On their Facebook page, R.A.T.S. states: "While the members' focus is on the development and preservation of the worker terrier breeds, they are always happy to visit places and properties where rat infestation is a problem. There is never a charge to anyone for eRATification. Coffee, water and kudos are appreciated."
Last December, a reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian, went along with a R.A.T.S. team on the lower East Side. The description of what he witnessed makes for grim reading.
"Seeing the rat killing up close is brutal," wrote reporter Adam Gabbat. "One rat ended up being beheaded, while another found itself subject to a tug-of-war between two lusty terriers."
The animal rights group PETA was outraged. In a statement to the Guardian, it said: "Rats are simply trying to eke out an existence like other New Yorkers, and setting dogs on team is depraved and illegal."*
Photo credit: Getty Images, then Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams with pellets of rat poison
New York City's new mayor, Eric Adams, has been fixated on fixing New York's rat problems for several years. He was critical of the $32 million anti-rat effort of his predecessor, Bill DeBlasio, initiated in 2017. More recently, he has hailed a new device, the Rat Trap, that lures rats into a box and then drops them into a bath of toxic liquid. He has proposed deploying the Rat Trap in areas of the city with the most serious infestations.
Let's face it. Most people just don't like rats. Maybe not to my extreme, but humans have long held an almost visceral hostility toward and fear of them. Sure, some of it may be because it turned out they were spreaders of the plague, which happened to wipe out a good chunk of the world's population in the 17th century. But there's more to it than that, I think. They destroy crops in rural areas as well as car engines in urban ones, are potentially dangerous, live in disgusting habitats and are, we have decided, ugly.
"Rats command a perverse celebrity status -- nature's mobsters, flora and fauna's serial killers -- because of their situation, because of their species destroying habits," wrote Robert Sullivan in his fascinating book, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.
The dominant species of rat in New York City is the brown rat -- rattus norvegicus -- whose ancestors arrived on these shores in the late 18th century by hitchhiking a ride on merchant ships. Sullivan evinces grudging respect for their tenacity and adaptability and even sympathy for the nasty, brutish and short existences of most city rats.
"In New York City, the bulk of rats live in quiet desperation," Sullivan said, "hiding beneath the table of man, under stress, skittering in fear, under siege by larger rats."
No doubt, most New Yorkers take a harsher view.
"I'm ready for Chernobyl," said Ken Peterson. "Poison every rat in the city. This has got to stop. They have to get a grip on it."
He concedes that indiscriminate mass poisoning is not a practical solution. It could potentially endanger children and domestic pets. When the city takes action against rats, it's usually by strategically placing prison bait or inserting dry ice into rat holes. The dry ice emits a lethal gas.
To deal with the rat threat to his car, Peterson at first tried a peppermint spray to deter rats. He now uses a solution of bleach and water, but worries that could damage the wiring casing over time.
"The one thing that gives me hope is we have a hawk in the neighborhood," he said. "We need more hawks."
Cover photo credit: Getty Images
* The legality of free-lance rat killings is unclear but I found no account of anyone being prosecuted for it.
