Drowning the Vermin

Flea and disease infested little creatures continue to roam the streets of New York throughout the day and night. To others outside of NYC they are known simply as rats you encounter once in a while, but what makes them different in New York is their over-breeding and evasive capabilities. Whether you might recognize them on your morning commute to work or the ‘Pizza Rat’ video that went viral, these rats played a crucial role in the development of our city dating back to the 1800s. The common rat that we tend to normally see was originally brought here hundreds of years ago back when ships travelled from Europe to the America’s. Our infrastructure innovations were what led to the beginning of the massive population boom of rats. The city created a welcoming haven for rats to live, breed and feed creating this a superior habitat for them to live in. Our infrastructure allowed rats to be able to travel up building pipes, live in alley buildings and squeeze through ventilation spots allowing them to peacefully coexist with us while making it a difficult pest for us to handle. Although multiple measures have taken place to control the rat infestation, such as increasing funding and looking into different pest controllers, these attempts are ineffective.

In addition to New York City’s vast amount of parks, trash bins and restaurants on nearly every street, this encouraged the rats to form a large burial network underground, while allowing them to feed off the waste and scrap foods left by store owners and litterers. This all might sound like a top ten list of why New York City is the best place for rats but in reality their existence is getting out of control. Numerous methods have been taken place by the city’s residents to control the plague of rats. Such methods include buying rat poison from your local Home Depot and spreading it outside your house, or according to Rob Picheta with CNN, the city takes action by “drowning” them. Yes, you heard me right, they are drowning them. To a person who might have background knowledge on rats you may think that rats are exceptional swimmers and can get themselves out of that situation, but you are wrong. This “effective” action has only recently been disclosed to the public. It mentioned that this device is made with an alcoholic substance inside, where the rat begins to climb to the top of the device to get bait until they are dropped into the alcoholic substance. This knocks the rat unconscious while also holding up to 80 rats at once.

These quote on quote methods that deal with rat population in the city claim to be working, yet citizens have never seen a change since the war on rats had been declared by Bill De Blasio two years ago. With this, I decided to look into how much money the city was spending to control the rat population, and I found that according to Forbes, the mayor spent a whopping 32 million. Seeing this made me very upset because I knew everyone’s tax dollars were contributing to ineffective methods in the city and that we needed to find the right person for the job. I looked into what procedures were previously attempted where I ran into an article by Morgan Hines where she said “ the New York City Department of Sanitation pulled 110 trash cans out of the neighborhood over the last 12 months, trash has been overflowing”. This is a perfect example of the attempt of creating a solution while making the output a big problem to handle.

This call to action isn’t only being directed to city officials but to ordinary citizens like me or your next door neighbor who go to our 9 AM TO 5 PM jobs that leave us completely exhausted. The last thing you would want is to see a large rat crawling on your kitchen floor or a expensive bill for chewed up electrical wires. I may not be providing an exact solution to deal with our infestation but I can clearly see that what’s being done to handle the problem isn’t working. We make up nearly 8 million people in New York while council members only make up 51 members proving that we have a stronger advantage. With that advantage, we can fight together as a city and demand for a change whether it means hiring a professional in rat ecology or creating some type of blockage system.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X3HwkA-Y45Y2OTnIZ_ZT6poKv9Yio0GpV_lgkI6xcA8/edit?usp=sharing

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