City’s rodent population reaches organizational maturity; mayor’s office proposes Rat Czar expansion
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
The Rat Situation, as of This Week
NEW YORK — The New York City rat population, which researchers at various institutions have estimated at numbers ranging from two million to eight million depending on methodology and how many of the researchers were afraid of rats, achieved what urban wildlife officials called a new level of organizational sophistication this week, as multiple reports from multiple boroughs described coordinated behaviors that the city’s Rat Czar — an actual position, created in 2023, currently occupied by an actual person — described as concerning in a memo that the mayor’s office described as preliminary.
The Rat Czar position was created with a mandate to reduce the rat population through integrated pest management, which is the technically correct term for a program whose colloquial description is making garbage inaccessible and then seeing what happens to the rats. The program has produced measurable improvements in certain areas, particularly where the city has replaced traditional garbage storage on sidewalks with containerized systems that deny rats access to the food supply that makes sidewalk living so appealing.
The rats have adapted. This is what rats do. Their evolutionary success across millennia of human civilization rests on adaptability, and the New York rat — shaped by a city that is simultaneously the most resource-rich and most intensively managed urban environment in North America — has become, over generations of urban selection pressure, something quite capable. The Rat Czar acknowledges this. It is in the memo. The word used is resilient, which is a word New York uses to describe itself and which, applied to the rats, lands slightly differently.
The MTA Proposal
A draft proposal from an MTA working group, which a spokesperson confirmed was preliminary and not yet official policy, explored the possibility of integrating rats into the subway system’s pest management economics through what the document called a revenue-participation framework, which appeared to describe a scheme in which rats that were trapped and relocated rather than killed would contribute data on tunnel geography through tracking devices.
This proposal was not formally adopted. It was, however, discussed at a meeting, which in New York City governance means it has entered the realm of the possible and will appear in a future investigative piece in The City NYC under a headline about accountability. The MTA has confirmed the meeting took place. The revenue-participation framework has not been confirmed as official policy. The rats were not reached for comment, though three were observed near the Times Square station exhibiting behaviors that subway staff described as purposeful.
The City’s Relationship With Its Rats
New York’s rats are, in a very real sense, part of the city’s cultural identity in the same way that the accents, the pizza, and the aggressive pedestrian culture are part of it — things that outsiders find extreme and that New Yorkers have normalized to the point of affection. The rat pushing a slice of pizza on the subway stairs in 2015 became a symbol specifically because it captured something true about the city: its rats have ambition. They have standards. They are not eating bad pizza. Gothamist covered that rat. Gothamist will cover the next one. There will be a next one. This is guaranteed by the city’s food supply, its infrastructure, and the evolutionary resilience of an animal that has coexisted with human civilization since civilization had grain to store. The Rat Czar is doing what can be done. The rats are doing what they have always done. The city continues.
New York, New York
New York City operates at a scale and intensity that makes every story a larger story. The subway delay is a story about infrastructure investment and political will. The rent increase is a story about housing policy and urban economics. The bagel dispute is a story about cultural identity and immigration history. The rat is a story about urbanization and ecological adaptation. The tourist is a story about how cities present themselves to the world and how the world receives what cities offer. Even the pizza disagreement is, underneath the comedy, a story about regional identity and the human need to have things that are ours, specifically ours, that we defend with disproportionate vigor precisely because they are ours and because the world is large and we need to stake our territory somewhere. New York is where many of these stories happen simultaneously, in a density that produces the particular creative friction that has made the city a cultural generator for a century and a half. The people who live here tolerate the cost and the noise and the subway delays and the rent and the rats because the city gives back something that cannot be fully quantified: the experience of being in a place where things are happening, where ideas collide, where the next conversation might change how you think about something, where the scale of human activity is so concentrated that you are reminded constantly that you are part of something enormous and ongoing. This is the deal. Most people who make it find it sufficient. Some find it extraordinary. None of them are moving to the suburbs.
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