Rodent Caucus Platform Calls for Sealed Waste Containers, Expanded Composting, and One Symbolic Seat Per Borough
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
They Were Always Here. Now They Have a Platform Document.
NEW YORK — Representatives of what organizers call the Greater Metropolitan Rat Caucus held an “informational presence” outside City Hall on Wednesday, distributing a four-page policy platform that, upon close reading, contains several genuinely defensible urban sanitation policy proposals embedded in absurdist framing, which is either sophisticated civic engagement by people who feel unheard or what happens when you give theater school graduates a civic grievance and a staplings budget.
The “representatives” were twelve performance artists in elaborate rat costumes. Their platform calls for: expanded composting infrastructure to reduce open garbage; stricter enforcement against restaurants leaving waste bags on sidewalks in non-sealed containers; increased funding for the city’s rat mitigation program; and one community board seat per borough as “symbolic representation for a constituency that has been present in this city since the Dutch arrived and has never received so much as a thank-you.” The first three proposals are genuine sanitation recommendations. The fourth is described in the platform’s footnotes as “aspirational.”
The Actual Rat Situation
New York City’s rat population is, by the estimates of researchers who study these things, in the millions. The NYC Department of Health maintains an active mitigation program using integrated pest management, community education, and targeted baiting in high-density areas. The previous administration appointed a “rat czar” — formally a rodent mitigation coordinator — who made measurable progress in targeted neighborhoods. The Mamdani administration has continued the program. Progress is real. The rats are also real. The factors that sustain rat populations — open food waste, aging underground infrastructure, buildings with extensive burrowing opportunities, the general abundance of food that a city of eight million people generates daily — are addressable through exactly what the platform advocates. The rats, metaphorically, have a point.
New York’s Cultural Relationship With Its Rats
No major city has a more complex relationship with its rats. “Pizza rat,” the 2015 viral video of a rat carrying a full pizza slice down subway stairs, became an instant mascot: ambition, carbohydrates, the unwillingness to let the infrastructure beat you. There are now social media accounts dedicated to rat documentation that have more followers than several city agencies. There are rat tourists, genuinely, people who come to New York specifically to see the rats, which is verifiable and says something about either the city or the tourists or the rats that this reporter is not certain how to articulate precisely.
The Gothamist covers rat stories with the same earnest engagement it applies to zoning hearings, because the rats are a genuine civic issue and rat stories generate significant reader interest, and sustainable journalism requires acknowledging both simultaneously. The rats are not going away. The coverage is not going away. The sealed waste container policy has been discussed for years. The discussion continues. In the meantime, the rats are doing what they do, which is adapting, persisting, and maintaining a presence in the city’s garbage economy that predates every current city official’s tenure by several decades.
The Social Media Dimension
The Rat Caucus’s Instagram account, launched the same day as the City Hall event, accumulated 12,000 followers in 48 hours. Its posts adopt the tone of earnest civic advocates: “Day 847 of requesting a sealed container policy at this restaurant. Day 847 of being declined. We adapt. We persist. We are New York.” The account has been featured in Gothamist and a New York Times Style roundup titled “Absurdist Activism: When the Message Is the Medium.” The costume collective has declined to identify as individuals. Their collective statement: “We are the rats. We have always been the rats. We are all, together, the rats.” This is performance art. It is also, spiritually, a fairly accurate description of shared urban experience in a city that requires everyone to adapt continuously to conditions not of their choosing.
What the Sanitation Department Says
The NYC Department of Sanitation’s containerization initiative, which has been working to move New York from sidewalk garbage bags to sealed bins since 2023, has made measurable progress in pilot areas and is expanding. The initiative addresses, directly, the primary food source the Rat Caucus platform identifies. The Department of Sanitation did not respond to a request for comment on the Rat Caucus platform specifically. A spokesperson for the Mayor’s office noted that “the administration takes rat mitigation seriously” and cited the mitigation program’s ongoing work. The rats were not reached for comment, which is consistent with their documented media strategy.
Mother’s Day for the Caucus
Today is Mother’s Day. Rat mothers nurse their young in carefully maintained nests, defend their offspring with notable ferocity, and produce litters of six to twelve in gestation periods of about twenty-one days. This means New York’s rat population celebrates Mother’s Day at a pace the human population cannot match and with a frequency the calendar cannot adequately recognize. Happy Mother’s Day to all New York mothers, human and otherwise, including the one behind the restaurant on the corner who has been there since November and whose 311 complaint is still open and whose situation has not changed and who is, by available evidence, doing very well. The city moves around her. She persists. This is, in its way, a New York story.
More satire: https://theonion.com
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/