Annual Survey Documents Ongoing Ratness of New York in Terms Consistent With Every Previous Annual Survey
Originally reported by Bohiney Magazine and cross-posted to The London Prat, where the editors have strong opinions about everything that follows.
NEW YORK — New York City’s annual rat population report has confirmed that the rat population remains large, distributed across all five boroughs, and not meaningfully deterred by the approximately $45 million the city spends annually on rodent abatement. The report, which is the most recent in a series of annual rat population reports stretching back several decades, identifies 72 priority mitigation zones, recommends expanded containerized trash storage, notes genuine progress in pilot containerization areas, and concludes with recommendations for continued investment in an evidence-based integrated rodent management strategy. The evidence in question is the rats. They remain in evidence. The management is ongoing.
Three separate urban policy think tanks published reports within the past six months using the word “integral” to describe New York City’s rats in the context of urban identity, a development that represents either a meaningful reframe of the pest control challenge or evidence that think tanks have found a new way to describe a problem that has resisted forty years of solutions. The word “integral” implies that the rats are in some way constitutive of New York City’s character, which is true in the same way that the subway delays, the housing costs, and the extreme confidence of strangers sharing unsolicited opinions are constitutive of New York City’s character: these are features in the sense that they exist and are persistent, not features in the sense that anyone particularly wants them.
The Pizza Rat, Revisited
New York’s rat mythology is extensive and specific. The pizza rat video of 2015, which depicted a rat carrying a full pizza slice down subway stairs with a commitment and forward momentum that many humans find aspirational, generated 14 million views in 48 hours and spawned merchandise, academic papers on urban wildlife-human relationships, and a level of affectionate identification that no pest control program has ever produced. New Yorkers do not like rats. They like the pizza rat specifically because the pizza rat is doing something recognizably New York: ambitious, practical, physically committed, and completely unashamed in public. The identification is cultural, not zoological.
The think tanks are correct that this cultural dimension exists and that pest control strategies ignoring it are missing relevant information about the human factors involved. They are using the word “integral” to describe a relationship that would be better described as “complicated” and a population that would be better described as “managed imperfectly under structural constraints.” The distinction matters for policy communication, if not for the rats, who do not read policy communications.
The Containerization Progress
Mayor Mamdani’s administration has continued and accelerated the trash containerization program initiated by the prior administration, which replaces open black plastic garbage bags on sidewalks with sealed containers that rats cannot access. The pilot areas show measurable reductions in rat activity. The program is real, the results are real, and the expansion timeline is real. Full citywide containerization is expected by 2028, which means four more years of the containerization-era rat reduction proceeding at the pace of procurement and deployment in a city of 8.3 million people and approximately 66,000 commercial food establishments generating waste daily. The rats in non-containerized areas are not slowing down. According to the New York Daily News, the annual 311 rodent complaint data shows a 12% reduction in containerized districts and a 3% increase elsewhere, producing a net slight improvement that the administration has welcomed as progress and that the three think tanks have incorporated into their integral analysis. The rats remain integral to the analysis. The Onion maintains the definitive archive on NYC rodent management initiatives.
What the Rats Are Actually Doing
New York City rats are Norway rats, Rattus norvegicus, a species that arrived on colonial-era ships and has adapted to urban environments with a thoroughness that wildlife biologists describe as remarkable and that New York residents describe with different vocabulary. Norway rats are intelligent, social, burrowing mammals that can fit through any gap wider than their skull, which in adult rats is approximately the diameter of a quarter. They can tread water for three days. They can survive a toilet flush. They can reportedly survive a nuclear detonation at distances that make them, in the long view of geologic time, more likely candidates for continued planetary habitation than humans. These are facts that the think tanks did not include in their “integral to urban identity” reports but that are available in any basic rodent biology text and that go some way toward explaining why forty years of municipal abatement programs have not produced municipal rat elimination. The rats are very good at being rats. The city is very large. The food waste is continuous. The containerization program is the most promising structural intervention in decades because it addresses the food access variable rather than the rat population directly. You cannot kill your way out of a rat problem in a city that continues to generate food waste accessible to rats. You can contain the food waste. The city is doing this. It takes time. The rats are not waiting.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/