Hi, It's West Casova. We're taking a break this week for the holidays, so here's an episode you might have missed from Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio. It's The Big Take. I'm West Casova. Today we go out in the city
looking for rats. The number of rat related complaints in American cities has spiked in recent years, which will come as no surprise to anyone who's taken an evening stroll in New York or Chicago or here where I live Washington, d C. They are fearless and they're all over the place, which made us wonder are there more rats now than there were before? Like, did the pandemic cause a rat baby boom? Cities have tried and failed for decades to control rat populations without much luck, So what can be
done to get rid of them? Fortunately, my intrepid colleagues here at The Big Take podcast set out to answer those questions. Producers Katherine Fink in Washington and Rebecca Shassan and Sam Gobauer in New York are here to tell us what they found. Catherine, Rebecca, Sam, nice to have you on this side of the microphone.
Oh, thank you for having us.
Wes wouldn't be anywhere else.
It's going to be fun, Rebecca.
To start.
Let me ask you, most people I know, me included, don't exactly love rats. No one is happy to cross paths with one of them on the street. But for the most part, they keep to themselves. Why do we need to get rid of them?
This is one of the big questions that I set out to answer, So I asked rodentologists doctor Bobby Corrigan to break it down. Here's what he told me.
They live in dirty areas, so you know when an animal forges in and around all this trash we're talking about. We know when trash goes bad right and gets rotten, right. We don't need it because we worry about getting sick. So the king food attracts various bacteria viruses that can hurt us and even in some cases kill us. If you get on CDC dot gov and you put in rats, you'll see that rats are listed of being associated with about fifty five different diseases. So disease is the second thing.
The third thing that's off and overlooked is rats. Getting we look at all these buildings around us, well, I can guarantee you we're looking at about went to the varge about eight fairly old apartment buildings right across the street here. Rats have been in those ceilings and they will make their burrow instead of the earth. The burrows will be in between each floor. So it's back to they were chewing on twigs and stems and all kinds
of branches. That's their natural life, even before the way cities. So when a rat is in a ceiling living close to someone, and you're in the ceiling has electrical wires, so you can see the issue. So they start chewing on electrical wires, and the electrical wire sparks, and literally they can burn a house down and have burnt houses there.
You'll be hearing a lot more from doctor Corrigan later on.
Okay, so now that we've established that, Catherine, you actually went to see for yourself exactly how our fine city, Washington, DC is trying to control the rat population. And to be honest, I'm a little squeamish to find out the answer.
Maybe for good reasonles that question led me to the Brightwood neighborhood in Northwest DC.
So you the crew, I'm the crew.
Me.
You have a much bigger crew than I do. Scared of I'm not scared of rats? Am I about to see a lot of rats? Yeah?
Yeah, I'm running.
I might need to give you a shovel.
You can, Oh yeah, as long as I can do it with one hand.
I'm willing.
This would this would be a perfect place for me to bring people that they want to smell wreck.
I wish I could bottle it up and smell it.
What what a rat smell like to you?
Take a rent?
Okay, m hm, Oh yeah, that's bad. That's not good.
You might need to get a shovel, Catherine. Okay, how did this little meet up come about?
Okay, I cannot emphasize this enough that I had no idea what I was walking into. So I reached out to DC's Rodent and Vector Control team. You heard some of the folks there and clip they're part of the Department of Health. And basically they gave me an address and I went that is all I knew going in. So that smell I referenced was coming from this big shed that was full of garbage cans in front of an apartment complex. And the rodent control team told me
that this is a rat hotspot. They estimate that over twenty rat burrows are underground there, And just for context, a burrow is at least a dozen rats, and one to two burrows is pretty typical in a residential yard, so that kind of gives you a sense of just how bad the problem was. So about two hundred and forty rats. The team comes to treat the site about every two weeks.
So how many people are part of this team that's doing this treatment.
When I got there, there were about seven guys or so. They all had shovels in hand. I had no idea what the shovels were for or what I was about to see. And then they turned on the machine.
Let me get in the wool zone.
So we've got this green contraption. It sort of looks like a lawnmower. I guess it's currently pumping chemicals underground where the rats are burrowing. So occasionally we're seeing some pop out of the holes.
Ope, oh oh.
That was the sound of a shovel smacking the concrete as the team attempts to kill an escape rat. Unclear if they actually got them or not. This is not for the faint of heart.
Okay, that was way worse than I was expecting. Catherine, So we heard a lot of sounds, and that we heard that sound of the machine. We definitely heard the sound of that shovel smacking something. But describe what they were doing. How were they trying to get rid of all those rats that were underground.
After they turned the machines off. I learned that the team was basically pumping carbon monoxide into the ground, which suffocates the rats on mass almost immediately. Some of them scurried out of the ground and were chased with shovels. That's what you heard there, and the team did this treatment a few times on both sides of the street.
I asked Gerard Brown, who's the program manager for the DC rodent invector controlled team, all about this, and he told me there's really no way to know how many rats they exterminated, so we have that estimate twenty or so burrows. But because the ground is their final resting place, the city is basically left with a rat graveyard and they don't really know what's under there.
That all sounds pretty terrible for you, Like how many times a day does this team have to pump carbon monoxide into the ground and slap rats over the head with shovels.
The short answer is many times a day. But I'm gonna let Gerard Brown answer that question.
So inspect the performers go twelve complaints a day, twelve and then when they finished their twelve, then they go to hotspots something like this where they've been working on you know, So the complaint's been going up.
Yeah, I read somewhere that last year the complaints had doubled or even more than doubled since twenty eighteen. I'm curious, are there more rots?
Have they migrated?
Maybe, you know, because of the space of the pandemic.
So the uptick, I believe comes from a few things, you know, the mild winners for the last decade, the more people over seven hundred thousand people in DC that live here. And then the visitors come in and go, and then you have food establishments twenty five percent of new food established within the last two years, you know. And then the pandemic hit and people work from home. Where they work from home, they generate more trash. People
don't use their garbage proes like this shoot. You know, those containers that the food comes in, they throw them in the trend without washing them out.
Yeah, garbage and sanitation is going to be a major theme in this episode. Definitely more on that later.
So as far as rat control goes, there's carbon monoxide, and I asked Brown what other techniques the team uses to keep the rat population under control. He told me they also use what's called tracking powder. Basically, they shoot it in a hole in the ground and it gets on the rats fur and when the rats groom themselves, they ingust the powder and die. So still pretty grim. But there are also less conventional methods on the table
that don't always entail killing rats. For example, contraception. So back in twenty nineteen, the DC team piloted rat birth control. I also wanted to ask Brown about something I'd read about that was happening in Chicago using feral cats to fight the rats.
Were plan on using cats, but it's a company that hands goals no most metarians, but we get pushedback. You know, people don't want dogs killing rats, so we're not gonna do that, got it? Yeah, I'll go buy a whole bunch of lis.
Catherine. Listening to all of this, it seems like cities are just not up to the job, like the rats are gonna win. How did all of this end? How did you leave it.
I thank the team for letting me pry during a very routine part of their day. We took a photo together. Then Brown asked me for my address. I told him, and he knew my exact block well, in large part because it is such a hospitable area for uts. He said that he's going to bring the team by sometime to help get this problem under control. So that was
pretty exciting. But I think ultimately what I took away from this experience, besides just how visceral it was, was just the serious limitations of these methods of rat control and how a city like DC can get ahead of the problem.
Catherine, Rebecca, and Sam assure me that by the end of this episode they will actually reveal how cities can get control of rats. We'll start talking about that after the break. All right, Rebecca, you've answered my question. Why do we have to get rid of rats? Catherine told us they're really hard to get rid of.
What do we do?
Yeah?
So, I've never had any particular fondness for rats out in their natural urban habitat, but through the reporting process on this story, I realized that I actually have no idea what the answers to that question, though, I reached out to somebody I knew could help me out, doctor Bobby Corrigan. This man has a PhD in Urban rodentology from Purdue. He consults with you as cities on their pest problems, and basically any question you have about rats,
he can answer it. He answered all of my questions ever so patiently, all while we were taking what he called a rat walk about around the city. Oh see, over here is one right there. It's scaried underneath the roly bin, and there he goes down that ramp. This was a little unexpected because around this time it was about ten thirty in the morning, and according to doctor Corrigan, that is long after a rat's general bedtime.
I usually say two hours past. Gosk is your rat rat o'clock?
It didn't seem like all that big a threat, just to see one rat hanging out on this plastic dumpster. But behind us was a trash can with an ad that said the opposite.
Says a little litter cant can lead to big problems, and then has a silhouette of a big scary We gotta make rats scary. You know, it's Hollywood. They love to make rats scary. Some great scientists out in Vancouver. They published a paper in twenty nineteen showing that when rats get close to us and live in our quarters, psychologically it really whacks us out. We can't deal with it. We feel attacked, we feel invaded, and so forth. So we cannot have our serenity in our own nests that
we depend on. And you see a rat skurry across your living room floor when you sit down to relax, or in your kitchen when you get up at night to get a snack or something, a rat goes across the kitchen sink, you're not going back to sleep.
Doctor Corgan told me to figure out how to get rid of the rats. You've got to figure out what makes them tick.
When I was a kid, I love Sherlock Holmes, so I think that's why I'm a rodentologist. It's always Sherlock Holmes, and so when I walk about in parks, I usually typically want to see where their burrows are. It's a little bit like I like the troutfish with fly fishing, and you learn how to read the stream, so there won't be burrows any old place in the park. There'll be burrows, specifically in some areas in the park, and
that's what we're gonna look for. Now. One of the things I'm gonna be visually searching for, you know, is to see anything heavy, like ornamental rocks that we may plant or naturally occurring rocks. So here, right here, we have a very large rock. You'll notice this big amount of soil here with all the gravelly look to it. That tells you that's the main entrance. So rats have a nest that is typically six feet long and has
three doors. One is the main door and two are what we call escape holes, you know, or we could think of them like we have side doors and back doors to our own homes. But this is classic. There's another factor here, as I keep stressing it, and that is even though that would make good for a good apartment complex, the question is is it in Philly close proximity to getting out of the house, getting to their
food quickly and getting back to the house safely. Because we have a major thoroughfare right out on the street here, and you'll notice restaurants right so from here, even you know, along the street in any direction is within the home range of these rats easily. Research has shown good research recent research has shown, you know, a city rat it can start a ninety feet in any direction for the short end of the home range, and go all the way up to four hundred and ninety five hundred feet
in any direction. So these rats are going to benefit probably from the bounty of what that that busy street with the restaurant's offers.
From there, Doctor Corgan and I left the park and we kept on truck, and our walk about continued down one of the side streets nearby. So in the park you were looking for hard surfaces that they could borrow under. Now we're walking on sidewalk and there's asphalt streets to the left. What are you looking for here?
What I'm looking for here is as sidewalks ass mentulia. As they get older themselves, we will see the old sidewalk is deteriorating, right, and.
So corner's kind of falling apart is just missing.
You know. For me, every time I see any kind of a shadow or a crack, you know, when I walk with my wife sometimes we're going someplace fun for dinner or something, and she can tell. She can tell like, Okay, you're looking for rats. You know, we're gonna have a good time. Right, I'm like, you bet, we're gonna have a great time. So you know, it's hard to shut it off sometimes, I guess, is my point, you know, but that's I don't know the world of a rodentologist.
It's how can you shut it off? So you know, here we have this you know, cobblestone, and it's very active. Yeah you know we can see yeah, thank you. Here he said it's a home for rats. He must live here, so so it's very you know, it's in our face all the time, all the time.
In a city that's getting older, there are holes and harbors for rats all over the place. After maybe twenty minutes with doctor Corrigan, I couldn't stop myself from interrupting him every couple of minutes or so, what's that? What about that one? These little holes and cracks in the sidewalk, I just couldn't stop seeing them. But he told me that there are some simple telltale signs to tell the difference between a hole and a home.
So that's ale and it's very active. And the reason you would know, as a rat detective kind of thing, that is very active as when rats travel, one is they lose hair, with two is their coats are always dirty and greasy, and they don't have shampoo, so as they come and go, you will notice.
Right here a grease stain.
There is this little oblong hole right on the edge of the sidewalk, and it has this kind of dark brownish grayish, vaguely shiny but too dirty to be called shiny splotch just to the right of it. And that's how he knew that this was a rat port of entry.
The grease stain.
Disgusting, illuminating. Rebecca, you told me about this recently, and I saw the photo you took, and I have to say it really changed things for me. I've told everyone, my parents, my roommates, I am always on the lookout for that grease stain.
Though.
Yeah, it's now a regular part of my nightly walks is to look for these grease stains. I.
However, am going to do everything I can not to see any grease stains.
Well for anyone who's also looking for other signs, maybe there's not a grease stain, but you still feel convinced that there's a ratneath that sidewalk. Doctor Corgan told me that's another telltale sign. As the rats tunnel they leave the sidewalk without support underneath, they dig out all the dirt and so then there's just empty space and that can't hold up the heavy sidewalk, so it just cracks under the weight.
Rebecca.
This leads to one of the other big questions I had, which is, in a city like New York, just how many rats are there under the streets?
Wes. I'm going to do you the favor that doctor Corrigan did for me. I'm gonna let you down easy. Nobody knows.
Is there a method to quantify the number of rats in the city. The answers, No, there's a lot of tunnels lower feet and they go every single which way, and they're piled on top of each other and this kind of thing. They're tunnel shaped mammals. And so when we built our cities around the world, all our cities are like this. And it's not that the rats are living inside the pipes, but when we put in a pipe, we have to create a space for that.
No, I'm sorry, that is not an acceptable answer in a podcast episode dedicated to getting rid of rats and cities. So I'm gonna need at least a ballpark.
Figure this is the best we can do.
For you.
A study from twenty fourteen published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society estimates that there are about two million rats in New York City.
And I have to say this study from twenty fourteen has gotten a lot of play. If you google Saxon figures about how many rats are in America's big cities, this is all you are going to get. I asked Jared Brown in DC the same question. Here's what he told me.
There's no way you can know how many rests in that area, you know, so we just measure a complise, but we know it is the increase in complaise those increase in.
Rets, right.
That's basically what doctor Corgan was telling me. There's no way to know how many rats there are because there's no way to know where all the rats are. There's just too many places that they could be.
So the amazing thing about the rat and its space is if if the skull can fit through the rest of the body, can do the limbo. So what you need is a half inch height for a skull twelve millimeters one basketball space can harbor an entire family of rats because they like to hugger mugger together. And they all get really close and inside the basketball They're like, this is a great apartment, right, they can do that.
They're true New Yorkers, True, they are.
They're true New Yorkers, and true you know every.
Place after break rats hate this one simple effects.
So all over the world, you know, in my contacts and my travels for the cities I do, surveys in rat populations are up globally. We're not sure why, but you know, the scientists we get together and we think along these lines global warming. The winters are less severe. Repeatedly for the past decade, we've had the warmest decade in old history. That's one thing, too, is human populations
are increasing. More humans, more trash, more protein. Cities are getting older, whatever city you want to pick, they're getting older. As the city gets older, the infrastructures keep deteriorating. That's why I pointed out the patries here. So as buildings deteriorate, the foundations deteriorate, the suites deteriorate, infrastructure deteriorates, we create more inaccessible harborages for an animal that only needs twelve meli meters.
At this point in the walk about, I was kind of starting to get it. Why killing the ones that we can find just doesn't quite cut it. As far as controlling the population, Doctor Corgan told me an example of a better solution was in a pretty surprising place. The pandemic.
You know, the city was shut down. All the cities that Philadelphia was shut down, all the East coast cities, the West coast, all the cities shut down for a couple of months. We were like no restaurants. The rats themselves were stressed. So when they used to come out at night in any city and try to get food in what used to be every night the dumpster had food, well no more dumpster. They need food just like we need food. So I was doing surveys right after the
pandemic shut down. I saw rats going at each other. I saw rats attacking each other. I saw colonies comte dely leave the area for parts unknon probably residential trash, quite frankly. But after that we hurt them numbers. We don't know by how many, probably hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of rats to come during that period.
Also, Gerard Brown and DC told me earlier that COVID led to a huge surge and residential trash because so many people were working from home, so in DC, at least in those early days, neighborhood rats had a field day. But I guess the bottom line here is that there's a direct link between the amount of garbage in an area and the size of the rat population. Rats cannot thrive without nearby trash. Remember how we said they only
travel a few hundred feet. That means in a place like New York City, rats who'd made restaurant leftovers their food staple were down on their luck in twenty twenty.
Yeah, and rat populations here in New York actually fell to historic lows during lockdow. But as the city came back, so did the rat population big time. Rebecca and I got a chance to speak to New York City's Sanitation Commissioner, Jessica Tish. She told us that budget cuts to the department early in the pandemic made a city already famous for filth even dirtier, which made a perfect breeding ground for rat resurgence.
I think most New Yorkers noticed that the city got meaningfully dirtier, and we are intent on cleaning it up.
One of the reasons the city.
Got dirtier during the pandemic to my mind, is at the very beginning of it. The cleanliness function was completely defunded from the Department of Sanitation, and those are their basic bread and butter services, So things like clearing out the litter baskets so that they don't overflow on street corners, sweeping the streets so that our curb lines aren't riddled
with litter, cleaning the highway on an off ramps. Those basic things were completely cut at the beginning of the pandemic in March or April of twenty twenty, and Mayor Adams not only restored them, but funded them at the highest levels that New York City has ever seen.
And Mayor Eric Adams famously hates rats. Everyone that knows me they know one thing.
I hate rats.
I hate rats.
I'm terrified of rats so much so that New York is actually hiring a rats Are to take charge of all things road and control related. The job postings asking for someone and I quote somewhat bloodthirsty who's able to burrow into the depths of city government to get the job done. Commissioner Tish says that managing our waste equals managing the rat population, and New York produces a lot of trash.
To give you some context, keep in mind that every day New Yorkers put out twenty four million pounds of trash and recycling on our curbs.
That's every day, every single day.
That is twenty four million pounds that sits on our curbs for fourteen hours a day.
It's a lot, but that's about to change. A new policy that starts in April is really going to cut down on the amount of time those bags sit out and the rats, they are not going to be happy about it.
We know that one third of all material in the black bags is organic waste, it's food, and so you can see how shrinking the amount of time that those black bags sit on the curb will actually make quite a meaningful difference in how the city looks and feels, to say nothing of the fact that the black bags right now serve as the all you can.
Eat buffet for rats. It's like the all night, all you can eat buffet for rats.
And so one of the goals of shrinking the amount of time time that the bags spend on the curb is shutting down that all night, all you can eat rat biffe, or at least dramatically limiting it's ours.
So here in DC, the impact of garbage and garbage collection is definitely on people's minds, but we haven't seen a change like the one in New York yet. There are plenty of residents, though, who want to get ahead of this problem by changing up the way we handle our trash. Like Kim Patterson, who is the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for Brightwood. She goes one of a bunch of community members who came by while the road and Control team serviced the block.
It's getting worse. There's garbage. You can see that the garbage bins are not secure. The owner pays the fines and still doesn't secure the cans. The residents are terrified to throw their trash there. They open the door. There's rats. Our trash cans are plastic. The rownas eat through them. Just give us a new can.
We have all these rules.
There's a hole in the can that the homeowner did not cause, it was the rat. Also, the trash cans that are public, they are open. There's no lid. Let's get some type of control where the trash can be in closed so the rest don't fest and feast every night.
Yeah, poisons all well and good as an immediate solution. If you've got a problem, you've got to handle it. But controlling the rat's food supply aka the trash supply, can cut their population down at the source. The only problem with that it requires a serious amount of buy in from all of us.
If you give the rat one bad property out of ten beautiful properties, that one bad property will feed the entire block rats just that one property. The whole block comes down based on one bad neighbor. It takes everybody to be honest with you, and most people do not want to be involved in rat control duties. When they get up every day, it's the last thing on their radar screen, you know. And there's the weakness nobody gets.
Some says, gee, I wonder if I should do a rat serving my own property and cut it off at the past. Everyone says, gee, I have rats. They pick up the phone, pick up the yellow pages, so to speak, and call somebody to put out some poison.
Thanks to Catherine, Rebecca and Sam, and thanks to you for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Ploomberg and iHeartRadio for more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at ploomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergalina, Our senior producer is Katherine Fink, our producer is Rebecca Shassan,
and our associate producer is Sam Gebauer. Raphael I'm Seely is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.
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