New York Rats – The Weird Side of the Internet

New York Rats – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

New York’s got a rat problem. The Big Apple is the rodents’ diet, and the worm in it is half eaten. They actually give rat tours, and I may be interviewing one woman that does that. But enough about me; let’s talk about the city that never sleeps. Because rats are nocturnal, and you’d have to sleep with one eye open anyway.

All that said, the city is going after them. They have GPS rat trackers, they’re in the lab figuring out what food they should use as bait, and telling city residents and businesses that they need to shape up. Because there are so many rats, people are scared to put their kids on the floor.

Meet your fighter: the lowly rat. Anywhere from fractions of a pound to fractions of ten pounds. Only need one ounce of food a day for sustenance. Lives about a year, averages twelve pups per litter, which it can put out about five or seven of in its lifetime. So one female rat make make eighty in a year.

So the tactic is, sort of obviously, to not leave food around. In 2015, the city put out new trash receptacles that could be sealed. This helped bring the population down more than gassing their burrows – a ninety percent reduction. Then the pandemic hit, and everyone said to hell with it and the rat population blew up again.

Denying them food will send them scurrying to find food, away from New York City, maybe to New Jersey. You know, but it wouldn’t be unheard of that they emigrate to the Capital Region. So let’s pick up our trash and give them a sour welcome.

And by the way, Albany has rats already. It is no mystery that the local hockey team was called the Albany River Rats. This makes me think of rats coming upriver like Washington on the Delaware on a plastic fast food tray with soda bottle pontoons.

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