Rats! It’s New York City
Rat school is in session as fed-up New Yorkers try to learn how to deal with a surging rodent population. Rats as big as bunnies are roaming the streets in broad daylight, nesting in trees and chewing through car engine wires that can cost thousands to fix. Complaints about rats to the 311 hotline have totaled 12,632 so far this year. The city Health Department sponsored the latest incarnation of “Rat Academy,” two hours of rat prevention training livestreamed Tuesday to nearly four dozen supers, tenants and homeowners. The city began such training sessions about 10 years ago. Not a day goes by that Amanda Levine doesn’t see at least one rat. She sprays her Jeep Grand Cherokee with a cocktail of cinnamon and mint oils and water under the hood and on all four wheels to ward off the critters. In her apartment complex, her neighbors tell her they hear scratching behind the walls. “You used to see the rats … on the tracks,” she said. “Now they are literally part of the neighborhood. They should pay rent.”
There are an estimated two million rats crawling through the city’s streets and subways, or about one for every four New Yorkers. The survey puts New York City in third place for the most rodent sightings in large US metro regions. Ahead of “the city that never sleeps” in the ratty ratings are Boston and Philadelphia. After a full day’s work, In the 22-second clip below, a rat appears out of nowhere and starts climbing the legs of a passenger who is fast asleep and unaware of what’s happening. A section of users was shocked to see the man’s calm demeanor. One user said, “Oh yea. They are everywhere, but this guy – he is the picture of calm when he realizes the rat. Who wouldn’t scream and jump and lose it in this situation?” Another recent video from a New York City subway showed what appeared to be over a dozen rats scurrying away from underneath a person’s blanket. No traps nor poisonous bait have fully succeeded in reducing their numbers. Rats have thrived in subway tunnels and burrows within empty lots and city parks.
NYC rat population has been ‘stressed’ by heat waves — leading to lower rates of reproduction Turns out, rats don’t like getting hot and heavy. In a wafer-thin silver lining to the unbearably humid, miserable, no good, very bad heat waves that have body-slammed the Baked Apple so far this summer, comes news that these scorching temperatures are wreaking sudden havoc on the reproductive rate of the city’s rat population. “A stressed rat is reproducing less. A happy rat is reproducing at a rate that science says we cannot exterminate our way out of,” the rodent router-outer explained. A gorgeous and more temperate summer day — such as Friday’s long-awaited mild weather —gets rodents in the mood for a furry scurry with one another, experts warn. The best thing people can do to curtail the out-of-control issue this summer, according to the expert, is “sealing entry points, eliminating food sources, and using traps or baits.” That, or pray for another heatwave.
September 10th Birthdays
1982 – Misty Copeland, 1953 – Amy Irving, 1974 – Jill Chartier, 1970 – Paula Kelley
1960 – Colin Firth, 1964 – Jack Ma, 1929 – Arnold Palmer, 1949 – Bill O’Reilly