The Not So Easy Trick To Getting Rid of Rats (In Big Cities)

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? Sports in it Ly, my intrepid colleagues here at the Big Take podcast set out to answer those questions. Producers Katherine Fink in Washington and Rebecca Chesson and Sam Gobauer in New York are here to tell us what they found. Katherine, Rebecca, Sam, nice to have you on this side of the microphone. Oh thank you for having us. Wess wouldn't be anywhere else.

It's gonna 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 rhodentologist Dr. Bobby core again to break it down. Here's what he told me. They they live in a 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 decaying food attracts various bacteria viruses that can hurt us and even in some cases kill us. If you get on c DC dot gov and you put in rats, you will 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 often overlooked is rats getting we look at all these buildings around us, well, I can guarantee you we're looking at about into the bog about eight fairly all department buildings right across the street here. Rats have been in those ceilings and they will make their barrow instead of the earth. Their barrows will be in between each floor. So it's back to day with chewing

on twigs and stems and all kinds of branches. That's their natural life even before there were cities. Someone a rat, it is in the ceiling, living close to someone, and you're in the ceiling has electrical wires, so you 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 burned house there. You'll be

hearing a lot more from Dr Core again later on. Okay, so now that we've established that, Catherine, you actually went to see for yourself exactly how our fine city, Washington, d C. Is trying to control the rat population. And to be honest, I'm a little squeamish to find out the answer. Maybe for a good reasons, that question led me to the Brightwood neighborhood in northwest DC. So you crew, I'm the crew. It's just me a. You have a much bigger crew than I do. I'm not scared of rats.

Am I about to see a lot of rats? Yeah? Yeah? Run might give you as long as I can do it with one hand. I'm I'm willing this. This would be a perfect place for me to bring people that that they want to smell reck. I wish I could bottle it up and sell it. What what a rat smell like to you? Okay? Oh yeah, that's bad. That's not good. You might need to get a shovel, Katherine. 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 d c's Rodent and Vector Control team. You heard some of the folks there in the clip. They're part of the Department of Health, And basically they gave me an address, and I what 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 hot spot. They estimate that

over twenty rat burrows are underground there. And just for context, a burrow is at least a dozen rats um 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 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 into So we've got this green contraptions of looks like a lawnmower. I guess it's a currently pumping chemicals underground where the rats are burrowing. So occasionally we're seeing some pop out of the holes. Oh oh oh, that was the sound of a shovel smacking the concrete as the team attempts to kill an escape the rat. Unclear if they actually got him or not.

This is not for the faint of heart. Okay, that was way worse than I was expecting, Katherine. So we heard a lot of sounds and then we heard the sound of the machine. We definitely heard the sound of that shovel smacking something. But describe what they were doing. How are 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 we're 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 d C rodent In vector 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 shirt answer is many times a day, but I'm gonna let Gerard Brown answer that question. So the inspect their performers go twal complaints, and then when they finished a tail, then they go to some like it's where they've been working on, you know.

So the complaint has been going up. Yeah, I read somewhere that last year the complaints have doubled or even more than doubled. Since I'm sure are there more rocks? Have they migrated maybe, you know, because of the phase

of the pandemic. So the uptick I believe they come from a few things, you know, Um, the mild winners for the last decade, the more people over seven hundred thousand people in DC that live here, and then the visitors coming and going, and then you have food establishments, a new food established within the last two years, you know, and then the pandemic hit and people work from home.

When they work from home, they generate more trash. People don't use it over was posed like this shoe, you know, those containers that the food comes in, They throw them into trash without wash 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 for and when the rats groom themselves, they ingest 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 had read about that was happening

in Chicago using feral cats to fight the rats. Are using cats, but it was a company no, mostly terrious, but we get pushed back. You know, people don't when scaling rats, So we're not gonna do that, got it? I wish we through. Yeah, I'll go by a whole month, 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 and how did you leave it? I think the team for letting me pride 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 rats. He said that he's going to bring the team by some time 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, and 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 answer is to that question. So I reached out to somebody I knew could help me out. Dr Bobby core Again. This man has a PhD in urban rodentology from her due 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 overhears one right, there's scary it underneath the roll weepen 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 Dr Corrigan, that is long after a rats general bedtime. I usually say two hours past dusk

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 it it can't can lead to big problems. Name is a silhouette. I'm 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 two thousand nineteen showing that when rats get close to us and live in our quarters, psychologically it really wax 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 nest that

we depend on. And you see a rat scurry across your living room floor when you sit down and 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. Dr Corrigan 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 Charlock Holmes. So I think that's why I'm a rot intologist, is

it's always Sherlock Holmes. And so when I walk about in parks, I usually typically want to see where the burrows are. It's a little bit like I like the trout fish 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.

Look floors. Now. One of the things I'm I'm gonna be visually searching for, you know, is um 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 mound 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 ft 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 like we have side doors and backdoors to our own homes. But this is classic. There's another factor here is I keep stressing, and that is even though that would make good for a department complex, the question is is it in fairly 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 in a city rat it can start at ninety feet in any directions for the short end of the home range and go all the way up to four feet in any direction. So these rats are gonna benefit probably from

the bounty. What that that busy street with the restaurant's offers. From there, Dr Corgan and I left the park and we kept on trucking and our walkabout continued down one of the side streets nearby. So in the park, you we're 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, as as mentuliad as they get older themselves, we will see the old sidewalkers deteriorating, right, and so owners kind of falling apart. It's 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 it's 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, yeah, we have this you know, cobble stone, and it's very active. You know, we can see yeah, thank you here he said,

it's a home for rats. You must live here, so so it's very you know, it's in our face all about time, all that time in a city that's getting older, there are holes and harbors for rats all over the place. After maybe twenty minutes with Dr 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 a whole and it's very active. And the reason you would know as a rating cactive kind of thing that's very active as when rats travel run is they lose hair. What two is their their coats are always dirty and greasy um and and they don't have champoo. So as they come and go, you will notice right

here a grease stain. There was 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 greased stain. Now. 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 rat neath that sidewalk. Dr Corrigan 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. Rebeccaously 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 West. I'm gonna do you the favor that Dr 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 you're piled on top of each other, and it's kind of thing. They're all 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 published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society estimates that they're about two million rats in New York City. And I have to say this study from has gotten a lot of play if you google facts and figures.

But how many rats are in America's big cities. This is all you are going to get. I asked Jared Brown and d C the same question. Here's what he told me. There's no way you can know how many rests in that area, you know. Um, so we just measure the complise, but we know is an increase in companise those increasing rats. Right, That's basically what Dr Corrigan 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 all you need is a half inch height for a skull tell 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 the true New Yorkers, and true you know every place after the break, rats hate this one simple fix. So all over the world, you know, um, in my contacts and my travels for cities I do surveys in where populations are up globally. We're not sure why, but you know, the scientists we get together and we 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 patris here. So as buildings deteriorate, the foundations deteriorate. The soon as deteriorate, infrastructure deteriorates, we create more inaccessible harbridges for an animal that only these

twelve millimeters. 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, Dr Corrigan 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 at Philadelphia shut down, all the East Coast cities the West coast. All our 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 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 shutdown. I saw rats going at each other. I saw rats attacking each other. I saw colonies completely leave the area for parts of known probably residential trash quite frankly. But after that we hurt

their 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 d C told me earlier that COVID led to a huge surge in residential trash because so many people were working from home. So in d C, 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 had made restaurant leftovers their food staple were down on their luck. In Yeah, and rat populations here in New York actually felt a historic lows during lockdown, 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 Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tish. She told us that budget cuts to the apartment early in the pandemic made a city already famous, fulfilled 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, and Mayor Adams not allly restored them, but funded them at the highest levels that New York City has ever seen. And Mary Eric Adams famously hates rats. Everyone that knows me they know one thing. I hate rats. I hate rats. I'm terrified rats so much so that New York is actually hiring

a rats Are to take charge of all things. Wrote in 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 two million pounds that sits 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 fields, 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 that the bags spend on the curb is shutting down that all night, all you can eat rat buffet, or at least dramatically limiting it's ours. So here in d see 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 was one of a bunch of community members who came by while the road in control team serviced the block that's getting worse. There's garbage. You can see that the garbage bins are not secure. Um 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 are trash cans are plastic. The ronus 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 lead. 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, isn' is all well and good as an immediate solution. If you've got a problem, you've got to handle it. But controlling the rats food supply, ak 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 rap 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 goes 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 say, gee, I wonder if I should do a rats are in 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 put out empois 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 Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or

comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergolina, our senior producer is Katherine Fink, our producer is Rebecca Chassa, and our associate producer is Sam Gobauer. Raphael I'm Seely is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm Westcasova will be back on Monday with another big take. Have a great weekend into a pot b