Welcome to New York City.
Home of Pizza Rat,
Subway Rat,
and Escalator Rat.
This is
a town of rats, and those rats have to be studied by people with flashlights. One
of those people is Rodentologist Bobby Corrigan.
I'm an urban rodentologist so
I study just the rodents of cities.
Nobody knows exactly how many rats there
are in the city but it's estimated that there could be millions and that's great
news, because the more rats you have the better.
I'm totally kidding, obviously.
It's hard to imagine a creature that's more despised than a street rat, but is
it really their fault?
Rats carry some pretty gnarly diseases like E. Coli,
Salmonella, and West Nile virus, as well as rat bite fever which, despite how it
sounds, was not an obscure 50s dance craze.
In 2014 Columbia University
studied rats inside residential buildings in New York and found that
they're even grosser than we thought.
The research confirmed that urban rats
carried 15 pathogens and 18 viruses that had never been seen before in the city. I
went to Chinatown in Manhattan with Bobby, to see what's enabling these
critters to live their best rat life.
I look for what I call you know conducive
conditions I mean just look at the gutter
it's especially by five, six o'clock this gutter is a complete buffet. Here's a bag
of food trash. Where'd it come from? Who knows.
You can see this little basket is just,
it's a simple ladder right up this in and in and then out.
And then...
a nice rat cave.
So Bobby, what else helps them? Trains, planes, automobiles, sewer lines,
electrical lines, you name it and this animal is usually taking advantage of it.
Any crack or crevice that is a half an inch in height and width is easy
opportunity for the rat to dark into.
Let's not get run over.
You'll notice here this big giant gap below this door, a rat would not even
have to duck there getting to whatever's on the other side of that that warm door.
It's as simple as putting in a rat strip at the base of a door, which costs all of
$85, so it'd be silly not to do that.
You know the word rodent means "to gnaw"
so anything that's linear like a wire, on an airplane, or a wire on a
subway, or the wire that's in your own home, then they're gnawing that and that's a problem.
It's actually a really big problem. Every year in the U.S. it's
estimated that rats cause nineteen billion dollars worth of damage.
So how much of our behavior contributes to the success of the city rat? It's a lot.
The amount of solid waste humans generate every year has been steadily rising for
decades. Our behavior is one of the biggest reasons rats prosper in cities.
If something as simple as installing a door strip can help keep rats in check,
then why do we spend our time making viral videos about how disgusting they
are, instead of fixing the problem?
We can be really lazy and we don't think
through things. There's lots of things we can do on a daily basis within a city
that would deny the rat it's existence. So, I'm just one person out of say eight
to ten million New Yorkers. What can I do?
It's actually pretty simple.
Everybody generates somewhere between four and six pounds of trash every 24 hours.
Be a smart mammal. Whatever you do with
your trash, ask yourself can the rats get to it? The city's helping out too.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a 32 million dollar plan last year that would
introduce new rat proof trash cans so no more wire basket rat ladders. And
there'd be better trash management and pickup as well.
We tend to take care of
pests after they become a problem, in other words we let them get established
and then we hire exterminators or we go out, we buy some traps. All of that is
after the fact instead of doing it proactively, I don't know maybe we should
call ourselves homoreactus.
So is this a hopeless fight? Should we just all lay
down in the trash-filled gutter and give up?
It is not true that
you can never get rid of rats. That's not true.
You know, what what is true is they can be managed through human behavior.
This species is very industrious, hard-working if you will.
Oh they have the ability to adapt to environmental conditions that can be
pretty extreme, but they're overpopulated in many cases because human beings make
it so good for them, quite frankly. So in many ways, will the rat maybe outlive us?
I'm gonna think it will.
I'm gonna think it will