I joined an 'elite squad of anti-rat activists.' It was even creepier than I expected.
"They're survivors," Barrett admitted.
Barrett told me about his efforts during our initiation into the NYC Rat Pack, a newly formed "elite squad of anti-rat activists" created by the mayor's office to escalate the fight against the city's infamous pests. "Elite" is a bit of a stretch, like calling the local Cub Scouts troop an "elite squad of wilderness survivalists." In reality, the Rat Pack offers regular citizens a crash course in rodent mitigation in hopes of inspiring them to take more active roles in what often feels like an unwinnable battle.
Those who join the Rat Pack must complete three activities: a "rat walk" that promises to "uncover the world of urban rats," a two-hour "rat academy" on rodent-prevention methods, and a service project, like a park cleanup. Graduates are supposed to leave with both the willpower and the know-how to make a dent in their local rat populations, whether that means simply disposing of trash properly or, for the high achievers, flooding rat burrows with poisonous gas.
I'll admit I enlisted more out of curiosity than a sense of civic duty. The very idea of a "rat academy" struck me as fascinating and hilarious, and I hoped to finish the program with a better sense of how this bloody battle is actually going. Mostly, though, I joined for the merch. Those who complete the program receive a hat or T-shirt with the Rat Pack logo, a striking piece of design in which a menacing critter pokes its nose into a safety-cone-orange R as if it's a bag of trash on the street. When Mayor Eric Adams and Kathleen Corradi, who last year was appointed the city's "rat czar," donned the apparel earlier this summer in a press conference announcing the initiative, the consensus among my friends was that it was undeniably sick.
That's how I ended up standing alongside Barrett and a couple dozen other New Yorkers on an August afternoon in Brooklyn's Herbert Von King Park, where Corradi, whose official title is director of rodent mitigation, was leading the second-ever rat walk. We didn't spot a single rat that day — it was too early for the nocturnal creatures to make an appearance — but there were ample clues of their presence. By the time we wrapped up the walk, it was obvious to me that even the strongest army of vigilantes wouldn't be enough to get rid of the city's rat issue.
Mostly, my journey into rat world left me with two big questions: What do we owe our cities, and what do they owe us? The answer to the latter, it became clear, was much more than a T-shirt.
The brown rat, or Rattus norvegicus, isn't all that different from the average New Yorker. It hates long commutes and loves a reliable food source, which it will keep returning to again and again. (It is also neophobic, meaning it fears new things.) It seeks out warm, safe places to lay its head, which is why it burrows underground. If you seek to understand this rat, Corradi told our group, "you can kind of just hold up a mirror and look at yourself."Corradi's rat spiel was full of pithy sayings like this one — often funny, evocative, or groan-inducing, but always relayed with a hint of awe at the resourcefulness of these vermin. Brown rats typically live only a year in the wild, but in that short period they're surprisingly productive — the females give birth up to seven times a year, and each litter can have as many as 12 rat pups. The addition of even one extra litter can have devastating consequences for a city block, making it nearly impossible to tamp down their numbers. Extermination efforts haven't always achieved the desired results, since rats are known to outsmart traps or gain immunity to poisons, and warmer winters have given them more time to breed at their energetic pace.
There's no definitive count of the rat populace in New York, though one recent estimate placed it at about 3 million. Various mayors, like Adams, have declared war on the rats, but none has come close to claiming victory. The real issue, as Michael Parsons, an urban-rat expert, told Business Insider last year, is "2 ½ centuries of bad practice" by bureaucrats who run the city. Adams offered a glimmer of hope in a July press conference announcing the Rat Pack, touting the fact that citywide rat sightings had gone down in 12 of the previous 13 months and promising that a "massive trash revolution strategy" — putting more trash in rat-proof containers — would get millions of pounds of rat-attracting garbage off the streets. But the incremental progress may be of little comfort to citizens who watch helplessly as rats scurry over their feet or down subway tracks or into cracks in the sidewalk outside their homes, to say nothing of the infestations within buildings.
Corradi, recognizable from various press appearances and her navy Rat Pack hat, is supposed to offer New Yorkers additional peace of mind. We began our walk near the park's playground, where we could make out a baseball-sized hole in the dirt that formed the entrance to a rat burrow, less than 20 feet from a busy swing set. It soon became clear why a rat would consider this valuable real estate: Nearby, a supposedly rat-proof city-owned trash can was overflowing with debris, belching out candy wrappers, banana peels, and leftover takeout. This was the kind of "five-star buffet" that Adams so often decries, at one of the covered trash bins supposed to offer an answer to this crisis. Corradi noted that the city was no longer ordering this specific bin, which a company called Bigbelly sells for anywhere between $1,500 to $5,000 apiece. The receptacle opens via a handle at about torso height or a foot lever at the bottom, keeping the waste secure inside. But the foot levers tended to break, Corradi said, and people didn't like having to touch the grimy handle. Sure, parkgoers really shouldn't be tossing their trash on top of an already full bin, but the more systemic issue is servicing, or making sure the bins are cleared out at reasonable intervals. Otherwise, Corradi told us, "we've created an even better food system for rats."
The Bigbelly felt like a smelly symbol of the city's larger problem: The government encourages individuals to play their part in the war on rats but doesn't always give them the tools to do so, even when they seem glaringly obvious. To city leaders' credit, that may be changing. Starting in November, apartment buildings in New York City with up to nine units will be required to use official city garbage bins rather than leaving their trash in bags out on the street. City officials say 70% of the city's trash will be "containerized" once the rule is implemented. At a press conference this summer to announce the move, Adams wheeled out one of these bins to face the audience, tossed in a bag of trash with a theatrical flourish, and shut the lid as Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" played on a speaker.
The rest of the rat walk was peppered with pertinent facts (rats won't hesitate to eat their fallen brethren if they can't find other food sources), and Corradi fielded questions from our group about the city's strategy (rat birth control is an emerging technology, but there's still a lot we don't know). Someone asked Corradi how she would personally dispatch a live rat."Dry ice will asphyxiate them," Corradi said. "But I work with a lot of exterminators — they take that shovel and go for it."
In general, our group accepted that fighting rats would require aggressive and sometimes violent tactics. But about halfway through, a child wearing Crocs and a tie-dye T-shirt posed a more existential query. "We've spent all this time talking about getting rid of rats," he said. "But why are we trying to get rid of rats?"
Corradi acknowledged that we won't ever rid our city of rats. "We're going to have to make peace at some point," she said. While we can't exterminate our way out of this problem, to repeat one of her favorite talking points, the fight is necessary because rats pose several public-health risks. People living with rats are more likely to have anxiety and depression, and rats carry diseases that can spread well beyond an infested city block. Last year, the city reported a record 24 cases of leptospirosis, a rare but potentially fatal illness carried by rat urine.
The fight against rats is ultimately a matter of a city's social contract with its citizens. Some take this war more seriously than others, patrolling the streets with rodent-killing dogs, offering to drop off cats at the mayor's own rat-infested rental property, or investing in weapons of mass vermin destruction. It can't hurt to get more average residents involved, and I applaud the mission of the Rat Pack, which offered an entertaining, if sometimes disheartening, deep dive on a sordid subject. But reaching a détente with the rats will require more than watchful citizens and a fleet of BurrowRxes; landlords will have to meet their legal obligations to keep their properties rat-free, and the city will have to overhaul its methods of handling the 44 million pounds of trash we produce every day. It's all about denying rats the comfort of their underground burrows and their aboveground food sources, a lesson that other rat-infested cities, like Chicago and Washington DC, have learned the hard way. Each of those cities has its own version of Corradi, too. But the truth is that delivering on this strategy goes beyond the capabilities of any one citizen — even the rat czar.
"This work is a daily practice," Corradi said, sounding like a mindfulness coach. "The truth is you give an inch back, they'll take a mile."
With that, the walk concluded. We posed for a group photo and chanted in unison: "One, two, three, rats!"
A couple of weeks later, I watched as a pair of 14-year-old boys poured the contents of a city trash can into a black plastic bag, knotted it up, and left it on a street corner to be picked up later. For that afternoon, at least, we were part of the same group of volunteers, charged with emptying the garbage receptacles along a busy thoroughfare in Brooklyn's Chinatown. The eight or so high-schoolers had been performing this ritual each weekday afternoon for much of their summer break.
This service activity, which I selected from a list of opportunities on the city's website, was the only thing standing between me and my Rat Pack hat. I'd already attended a virtual version of the rat academy, during which a city employee rehashed many of the talking points from Corradi's rat walk, only this time aided by a PowerPoint presentation with vivid images of the rodents living beneath our feet. There was also a live chat in which attendees vented their personal rat frustrations and asked questions like whether rats eat pigeons (yes, apparently they do sometimes). For the volunteer component, I signed up for the option that sounded like it would have the most impact: the 8th Avenue Street Cleanup, hosted by a local nonprofit. After all this talk about how much rats love trash, I kind of liked the idea of getting some of it off the streets.
But there we were, moving the trash from open-air bins to plastic bags that would be only slightly — and I mean slightly — harder to access for rats, who can chew through anything softer than steel. The streets did look nicer without all the exposed garbage, but for all the rodents could tell, the address and menu of their favorite restaurant were basically unchanged. The work was smelly and gross, but the kids seemed to be having an all right time. I asked one of them why this job wasn't being done by, you know, an actual garbageman, and he shrugged cheerily. "No funds?" he guessed. He didn't see a need to dwell on it.
Fridays, mercifully, are light days for trash, and we wrapped up a little early. Sitting on the subway back to my apartment, I thought back to an instance in April when someone publicly confronted Adams about a pilot program to containerize trash in West Harlem, calling it a "failure" and "unacceptable." Adams, clearly incensed, reiterated his hatred of rats and promised to "containerize all of our garbage."
"You'll never get rid of rats if you have plastic bags on the street," Adams said.
Adams made a good point: Leaving a swollen garbage bag out past dark is like serving our furry neighbors a five-course meal. And yet I secured my precious Rat Pack merch by doing exactly that.
James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.