By Patrick Smith and Andrea Marks
On a crisp fall Friday evening, Caroline Bragdon, director of neighborhood interventions for the city health department and dean of the Rat Academy, lectures a small crowd in an East Village community garden. “Our rats are so well fed and their life is so good, they can reproduce year round,” says the self-christened Rat Lady.
Rats. From Pizza Rat to Rat vs. Pigeon, for New Yorkers they are more than a source of internet entertainment. They are our neighbors, and their population is growing so substantially that the city has constructed programs to combat their expanding numbers. Rat complaints are expected to top 24,000 this year.
FUN RAT FACT: A typical female rat gives birth to 7-10 pups per litter and can bear 7 to 10 litters per year. 10×10=100. That’s a lot of rats.
“They’re everywhere in this area,” says Jose Serano, 45, who lives on East 105th Street. “Is the city really going to do anything?” he asked. “You know, the rich people – they have no rats.”
Caroline Bragdon leading a Rat Academy. (Photo by Andrea Marks)
Serano lives in what the city considers a “rat reservoir.” Last year it funded a pilot program to attack such areas with chronic rat infestations. Each reservoir gets two case officers to monitor rat activity and educate residents about prevention.
While rats don’t actively discriminate between the affluent and impoverished, economically disadvantaged areas are more prone to infestation. “In a rich neighborhood with wealthy co-ops or condos, you might have 10 building staff” to sweep the sidewalk and manage trash pick-up, Bragdon said. “A poorer neighborhood, they maybe have one super.”
Aging infrastructure and a higher tolerance for the long-tailed rodent also may play a part in lower income neighborhoods. “They may be so used to them they don’t even call,” Bragdon said.
FUN RAT FACT: Rats don’t actually live deep in subway tunnels. They come in search of half-eaten Big Macs passengers discard on the tracks, then return to their nests during the day.
Bragdon leads one or two Rat Academy classes a month. Since Norway rats, the dominant New York species, prefer to dig their burrows in fresh, healthy soil, gardens often host large colonies. But Bragdon says it’s a myth that gardens attract rodents: There has to be a food source nearby.
That’s why the biggest culprit in rat perpetuation is garbage. “It’s legal to put bags filled with garbage on the curb in the evening,” Bragdon said. But “it’s not a good idea when you’re trying to prevent rats.” Buildings in poor neighborhoods without many staff to handle the refuse tend to have more trash piled in the street.
Trash: A rat buffet. (Photo by Fahmo Mohammed)
Rats rarely travel more than 500 feet from their nests, so they take up residence near inviting piles of garbage, feeding in the evening just as trash is being put on the sidewalk. Bon appétit.
Uptown’s rodent problem has worsened in recent years, said David Lopez, manager at Bug Off exterminators in Washington Heights. “The problem is with people not being clean,” he said. “People don’t pick up their dog poop.” Rats eat the excrement because it contains undigested food, he explained. (Dog poop is not their first choice in cuisine, however, Bragdon said. They prefer a complex diet of protein, vegetables and carbohydrates, provided in abundance in a typical trash mix outside a restaurant, apartment building or school.)
FUN RAT FACT: Although bodega cats, who have their own Instagram account, may catch a rat from time to time, they can’t keep up with their multiplying numbers and are not a strong rat deterrent.
“I think the city has been doing something about it. They came in July or August and patched up the holes,” said Leticia Oquendo, 51, manager at a dentist’s office on Lexington Avenue at East 105th Street. “There were lots of them before, running all over the place. White ones from the school across the street were mixing with the black and grey ones. It was a big problem, but the city took care of it.”
A flyer advertising a recent Rat Academy.
Did it? Pat Doyle, 47, a union laborer who lives at 1671 Lexington Ave, says he takes out the garbage every morning at around 4:30 a.m. and encounters massive rats “shooting up from the garbage cans.” “The city was supposed to do something about it but to be honest, I haven’t seen any change,” he added.
Bragdon says significant change won’t occur until we stop piling garbage bags on the curb during peak rat mealtimes. “That is the magic bullet,” she said. “How do we safely and effectively remove garbage from New York City without the storage place being plastic bags for hours on end?”
Until we are able to conquer rattus norvegicus, check the Rat Information Portal to see how your building compares with others in your area.
Additional reporting by Krutika Pathi, Zara Rubin, Fahmo Mohammed and Isabella Kulkarni
(Featured photo: m01229/flickr)
