Speaker 1: From Bloomberg News and I Heart Radio. It's the Big Take.
Speaker 1: I'm West Cossova. Today we go out in the city
Speaker 1: looking for rats. The number of rat related complaints in
Speaker 1: American cities has spiked in recent years, which will come
Speaker 1: as no surprise to anyone who's taken an evening stroll
Speaker 1: in New York or Chicago or here where I live, Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. They are fearless and they're all over the place,
Speaker 1: which made us wonder are there more rats now than
Speaker 1: there were before? Like did the pandemic cause a rat
Speaker 1: baby boom? Cities have tried and failed for decades to
Speaker 1: control rat populations without much luck. So what can be
Speaker 1: done to get rid of them? Sports in it Ly,
Speaker 1: my intrepid colleagues here at the Big Take podcast set
Speaker 1: out to answer those questions. Producers Katherine Fink in Washington
Speaker 1: and Rebecca Chesson and Sam Gobauer in New York are
Speaker 1: here to tell us what they found. Katherine, Rebecca, Sam,
Speaker 1: nice to have you on this side of the microphone.
Speaker 1: Oh thank you for having us. Wess wouldn't be anywhere else.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be fun. Rebecca. To start, let me ask you.
Speaker 1: Most people I know me included. Don't exactly love rats.
Speaker 1: No one is happy to cross paths with one of
Speaker 1: them on the street. But for the most part, they
Speaker 1: keep to themselves. Why do we need to get rid
Speaker 1: of them? This is one of the big questions that
Speaker 1: I set out to answer, So I asked rhodentologist Dr.
Speaker 1: Bobby core again to break it down. Here's what he
Speaker 1: told me. They they live in a dirty areas, So
Speaker 1: you know when an animal forges in and around all
Speaker 1: this trash we're talking about. We know when trash goes
Speaker 1: bad right and gets rotten, right. We don't need it
Speaker 1: because we worry about getting sick. So decaying food attracts
Speaker 1: various bacteria viruses that can hurt us and even in
Speaker 1: some cases kill us. If you get on c DC
Speaker 1: dot gov and you put in rats, you will see
Speaker 1: that rats are listed of being associated with about fifty
Speaker 1: five different diseases. So disease is the second thing. The
Speaker 1: third thing that's often overlooked is rats getting we look
Speaker 1: at all these buildings around us, well, I can guarantee
Speaker 1: you we're looking at about into the bog about eight
Speaker 1: fairly all department buildings right across the street here. Rats
Speaker 1: have been in those ceilings and they will make their
Speaker 1: barrow instead of the earth. Their barrows will be in
Speaker 1: between each floor. So it's back to day with chewing
Speaker 1: on twigs and stems and all kinds of branches. That's
Speaker 1: their natural life even before there were cities. Someone a rat,
Speaker 1: it is in the ceiling, living close to someone, and
Speaker 1: you're in the ceiling has electrical wires, so you you
Speaker 1: can see the issue. So they start chewing on electrical wires,
Speaker 1: and the electrical wire sparks and literally they can burn
Speaker 1: a house down and have burned house there. You'll be
Speaker 1: hearing a lot more from Dr Core again later on. Okay,
Speaker 1: so now that we've established that, Catherine, you actually went
Speaker 1: to see for yourself exactly how our fine city, Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Is trying to control the rat population. And
Speaker 1: to be honest, I'm a little squeamish to find out
Speaker 1: the answer. Maybe for a good reasons, that question led
Speaker 1: me to the Brightwood neighborhood in northwest DC. So you crew,
Speaker 1: I'm the crew. It's just me a. You have a
Speaker 1: much bigger crew than I do. I'm not scared of rats.
Speaker 1: Am I about to see a lot of rats? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Run might give you as long as I can do
Speaker 1: it with one hand. I'm I'm willing this. This would
Speaker 1: be a perfect place for me to bring people that
Speaker 1: that they want to smell reck. I wish I could
Speaker 1: bottle it up and sell it. What what a rat
Speaker 1: smell like to you? Okay? Oh yeah, that's bad. That's
Speaker 1: not good. You might need to get a shovel, Katherine. Okay,
Speaker 1: how did this little meet up come about? Okay? I
Speaker 1: cannot emphasize this enough that I had no idea what
Speaker 1: I was walking into. So I reached out to d
Speaker 1: c's Rodent and Vector Control team. You heard some of
Speaker 1: the folks there in the clip. They're part of the
Speaker 1: Department of Health, And basically they gave me an address,
Speaker 1: and I what that is? All I knew going in.
Speaker 1: So that smell I referenced was coming from this big
Speaker 1: shed that was full of garbage cans in front of
Speaker 1: an apartment complex. And the rodent control team told me
Speaker 1: that this is a rat hot spot. They estimate that
Speaker 1: over twenty rat burrows are underground there. And just for context,
Speaker 1: a burrow is at least a dozen rats um and
Speaker 1: one to two burrows is pretty typical in a residential yard.
Speaker 1: So that kind of gives you a sense of just
Speaker 1: how bad the problem was. So about two rats. The
Speaker 1: team comes to treat the site about every two weeks,
Speaker 1: So how many people are part of this team that's
Speaker 1: doing this treatment. When I got there, there were about
Speaker 1: seven guys or so. They all had shovels in hand.
Speaker 1: I had no idea what the shovels were for or
Speaker 1: what I was about to see. And then they turned
Speaker 1: on the machine. Let me get into So we've got
Speaker 1: this green contraptions of looks like a lawnmower. I guess
Speaker 1: it's a currently pumping chemicals underground where the rats are burrowing.
Speaker 1: So occasionally we're seeing some pop out of the holes.
Speaker 1: Oh oh oh, that was the sound of a shovel
Speaker 1: smacking the concrete as the team attempts to kill an
Speaker 1: escape the rat. Unclear if they actually got him or not.
Speaker 1: This is not for the faint of heart. Okay, that
Speaker 1: was way worse than I was expecting, Katherine. So we
Speaker 1: heard a lot of sounds and then we heard the
Speaker 1: sound of the machine. We definitely heard the sound of
Speaker 1: that shovel smacking something. But describe what they were doing.
Speaker 1: How are they trying to get rid of all those
Speaker 1: rats that were underground. After they turned the machines off,
Speaker 1: I learned that the team was basically pumping carbon monoxide
Speaker 1: into the ground, which suffocates the rats on mass almost immediately,
Speaker 1: some of them scurried out of the ground and we're
Speaker 1: chased with shovels. That's what you heard there, And the
Speaker 1: team did this treatment a few times on both sides
Speaker 1: of the street. I asked Gerard Brown, who's the program
Speaker 1: manager for the d C rodent In vector controlled team,
Speaker 1: all about this, and he told me there's really no
Speaker 1: way to know how many rats they exterminated, so we
Speaker 1: have that estimate twenty or so burrows. But because the
Speaker 1: ground is their final resting place, the city is basically
Speaker 1: left with a rat graveyard and they don't really know
Speaker 1: what's under there. That all sounds pretty terrible for you,
Speaker 1: Like how many times a day does this team have
Speaker 1: to pump carbon monoxide into the ground and slap rats
Speaker 1: over the head with shovels. The shirt answer is many
Speaker 1: times a day, but I'm gonna let Gerard Brown answer
Speaker 1: that question. So the inspect their performers go twal complaints,
Speaker 1: and then when they finished a tail, then they go
Speaker 1: to some like it's where they've been working on, you know.
Speaker 1: So the complaint has been going up. Yeah, I read
Speaker 1: somewhere that last year the complaints have doubled or even
Speaker 1: more than doubled. Since I'm sure are there more rocks?
Speaker 1: Have they migrated maybe, you know, because of the phase
Speaker 1: of the pandemic. So the uptick I believe they come
Speaker 1: from a few things, you know, Um, the mild winners
Speaker 1: for the last decade, the more people over seven hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people in DC that live here, and then the
Speaker 1: visitors coming and going, and then you have food establishments,
Speaker 1: a new food established within the last two years, you know,
Speaker 1: and then the pandemic hit and people work from home.
Speaker 1: When they work from home, they generate more trash. People
Speaker 1: don't use it over was posed like this shoe, you know,
Speaker 1: those containers that the food comes in, They throw them
Speaker 1: into trash without wash them out. Yeah, garbage and sanitation
Speaker 1: is going to be a major theme in this episode.
Speaker 1: Definitely more on that later. So as far as rat
Speaker 1: control goes, there's carbon monoxide And I asked Brown what
Speaker 1: other techniques the team uses to keep the rat population
Speaker 1: under control. He told me they also use what's called
Speaker 1: tracking powder. Basically, they shoot it in a hole in
Speaker 1: the ground and it gets on the rats for and
Speaker 1: when the rats groom themselves, they ingest the powder and die.
Speaker 1: So still pretty grim. But there are also less conventional
Speaker 1: methods on the table that don't always entail killing rats.
Speaker 1: For example, contraception. So back in twenty nineteen, the DC
Speaker 1: team piloted rat birth control. I also wanted to ask
Speaker 1: Brown about something I had read about that was happening
Speaker 1: in Chicago using feral cats to fight the rats. Are
Speaker 1: using cats, but it was a company no, mostly terrious,
Speaker 1: but we get pushed back. You know, people don't when
Speaker 1: scaling rats, So we're not gonna do that, got it?
Speaker 1: I wish we through. Yeah, I'll go by a whole month, Catherine.
Speaker 1: Listening to all of this, it seems like cities are
Speaker 1: just not up to the job, like the rats are
Speaker 1: gonna win. How did all of this and how did
Speaker 1: you leave it? I think the team for letting me
Speaker 1: pride during a very routine part of their day. We
Speaker 1: took a photo together. Then Brown asked me for my address.
Speaker 1: I told him, and he knew my exact block well,
Speaker 1: in large part because it is such a hospitable area
Speaker 1: for rats. He said that he's going to bring the
Speaker 1: team by some time to help get this problem under control.
Speaker 1: So that was pretty exciting. But I think ultimately what
Speaker 1: I took away from this experience, besides just how visceral
Speaker 1: it was, was just the serious limitations of these methods
Speaker 1: of rat control and how a city like DC can
Speaker 1: get ahead of the problem. Catherine, Rebecca, and Sam assure
Speaker 1: me that by the end of this episode they will
Speaker 1: actually reveal how cities can get control of rats, and
Speaker 1: we'll start talking about that after the break. All right, Rebecca,
Speaker 1: you've answered my question. Why do we have to get
Speaker 1: rid of rats? Catherine told us they're really hard to
Speaker 1: get rid of. What do we do? Yeah? So, I've
Speaker 1: never had any particular fondness for rats out in their
Speaker 1: natural urban habitat, but through the reporting process on this story,
Speaker 1: I realized that I actually have no idea what the
Speaker 1: answer is to that question. So I reached out to
Speaker 1: somebody I knew could help me out. Dr Bobby core Again.
Speaker 1: This man has a PhD in urban rodentology from her
Speaker 1: due He consults with you as cities on their pest problems,
Speaker 1: and basically any question you have about rats. He can
Speaker 1: answer it. He answered all of my questions ever so patiently,
Speaker 1: all while we were taking what he called a rat
Speaker 1: walk about around the city. Oh see overhears one right,
Speaker 1: there's scary it underneath the roll weepen and there he
Speaker 1: goes down that ramp. This was a little unexpected because
Speaker 1: around this time it was about ten thirty in the morning,
Speaker 1: and according to Dr Corrigan, that is long after a
Speaker 1: rats general bedtime. I usually say two hours past dusk
Speaker 1: is your rat rat o' clock. It didn't seem like
Speaker 1: all that big a threat, just to see one rat
Speaker 1: hanging out on this plastic dumpster. But behind us was
Speaker 1: a trash can with an ad that said the opposite
Speaker 1: says a little it it can't can lead to big problems.
Speaker 1: Name is a silhouette. I'm a big scary. We gotta
Speaker 1: make rats scary. You know it's Hollywood. They love to
Speaker 1: make rats scary. Some great scientists out in Vancouver. They
Speaker 1: published a paper in two thousand nineteen showing that when
Speaker 1: rats get close to us and live in our quarters,
Speaker 1: psychologically it really wax us out. We can't deal with it.
Speaker 1: We feel attacked, we feel invaded, and so forth. So
Speaker 1: we cannot have our serenity in our own nest that
Speaker 1: we depend on. And you see a rat scurry across
Speaker 1: your living room floor when you sit down and relax,
Speaker 1: or in your kitchen when you get up at night
Speaker 1: to get a snack or something, a rat goes across
Speaker 1: the kitchen sink, you're not going back to sleep. Dr
Speaker 1: Corrigan told me to figure out how to get rid
Speaker 1: of the rats. You've got to figure out what makes
Speaker 1: them tick. When I was a kid, I love Charlock Holmes.
Speaker 1: So I think that's why I'm a rot intologist, is
Speaker 1: it's always Sherlock Holmes. And so when I walk about
Speaker 1: in parks, I usually typically want to see where the
Speaker 1: burrows are. It's a little bit like I like the
Speaker 1: trout fish with fly fishing, and you learn how to
Speaker 1: read the stream. So there won't be burrows any old
Speaker 1: place in the park. There'll be burrows specifically in some
Speaker 1: areas in the park. And that's what we're gonna look.
Speaker 1: Look floors. Now. One of the things I'm I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be visually searching for, you know, is um to see
Speaker 1: anything heavy like ornamental rocks that we may plant or
Speaker 1: naturally occurring rocks. So here right here we have a
Speaker 1: very large rock. You'll notice this big mound of soil
Speaker 1: here with all the gravelly look to it. That tells
Speaker 1: you that's the main entrance. So rats have a nest
Speaker 1: that is typically six ft long and has three doors.
Speaker 1: One is the main door and two are what we
Speaker 1: call escape holes, you know, or we could think of
Speaker 1: like we have side doors and backdoors to our own homes.
Speaker 1: But this is classic. There's another factor here is I
Speaker 1: keep stressing, and that is even though that would make
Speaker 1: good for a department complex, the question is is it
Speaker 1: in fairly close proximity to getting out of the house,
Speaker 1: getting to their food quickly, and getting back to the
Speaker 1: house safely. Because we have a major thoroughfare right out
Speaker 1: on the street here, and you'll notice restaurants right So
Speaker 1: from here, even you know, along the street in any
Speaker 1: direction is within the home range of these rats easily.
Speaker 1: Research has shown good research. Recent research has shown in
Speaker 1: a city rat it can start at ninety feet in
Speaker 1: any directions for the short end of the home range
Speaker 1: and go all the way up to four feet in
Speaker 1: any direction. So these rats are gonna benefit probably from
Speaker 1: the bounty. What that that busy street with the restaurant's offers.
Speaker 1: From there, Dr Corgan and I left the park and
Speaker 1: we kept on trucking and our walkabout continued down one
Speaker 1: of the side streets nearby. So in the park, you
Speaker 1: we're looking for hard surfaces that they could borrow under.
Speaker 1: Now we're walking on sidewalk and there's asphalt streets to
Speaker 1: the left. What are you looking for here? What I'm
Speaker 1: looking for here is as sidewalks, as as mentuliad as
Speaker 1: they get older themselves, we will see the old sidewalkers deteriorating, right,
Speaker 1: and so owners kind of falling apart. It's just missing,
Speaker 1: you know. For me, every time I see any kind
Speaker 1: of a shadow or a crack, you know, when I
Speaker 1: walk with my wife sometimes we're going someplace fun for
Speaker 1: dinner or something, and she can tell. She can tell like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you're looking for rats. You know we're gonna have a
Speaker 1: good time, right, I'm like, you bet, we're gonna have
Speaker 1: a great time. So, you know, it's hard to shut
Speaker 1: it off sometimes I guess it's my point, you know,
Speaker 1: But that's I don't know the world of a rodentologist.
Speaker 1: It's how can you shut it off? So you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have this you know, cobble stone, and it's very active.
Speaker 1: You know, we can see yeah, thank you here he said,
Speaker 1: it's a home for rats. You must live here, so
Speaker 1: so it's very you know, it's in our face all
Speaker 1: about time, all that time in a city that's getting older,
Speaker 1: there are holes and harbors for rats all over the place.
Speaker 1: After maybe twenty minutes with Dr Corrigan, I couldn't stop
Speaker 1: myself from interrupting him every couple of minutes or so,
Speaker 1: what's that? What about that one? These little holes and
Speaker 1: cracks in the sidewalk, I just couldn't stop seeing them.
Speaker 1: But he told me that there are some simple telltale
Speaker 1: signs to tell the difference between a hole and a home.
Speaker 1: So that's a whole and it's very active. And the
Speaker 1: reason you would know as a rating cactive kind of
Speaker 1: thing that's very active as when rats travel run is
Speaker 1: they lose hair. What two is their their coats are
Speaker 1: always dirty and greasy um and and they don't have champoo.
Speaker 1: So as they come and go, you will notice right
Speaker 1: here a grease stain. There was this little oblong hole
Speaker 1: right on the edge of the sidewalk, and it has
Speaker 1: this kind of dark brownish, grayish, vaguely shiny but too
Speaker 1: dirty to be called shiny splotch just to the right
Speaker 1: of it, and that's how he knew that this was
Speaker 1: a rat port of entry. The grease stain disgusting, illuminating. Rebecca,
Speaker 1: you told me about this recently, and I saw the
Speaker 1: photo you took, and I have to say it really
Speaker 1: changed things for me. I've told everyone, my parents, my roommates,
Speaker 1: I am always on the lookout for that greased stain. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's now a regular part of my nightly walks is
Speaker 1: to look for these grease stains. I, however, am going
Speaker 1: to do everything I can not to see any grease stains.
Speaker 1: Well for anyone who's also looking for other signs, maybe
Speaker 1: there's not a grease stain, but you still feel convinced
Speaker 1: that there's a rat neath that sidewalk. Dr Corrigan told
Speaker 1: me that's another telltale sign. As the rats tunnel, they
Speaker 1: leave the sidewalk without support underneath. They dig out all
Speaker 1: the dirt and so then there's just empty space and
Speaker 1: that can't hold up the heavy sidewalk, so it just
Speaker 1: cracks under the weight. Rebeccaously to one of the other
Speaker 1: big questions, I had, which is in a city like
Speaker 1: New York, just how many rats are there under the
Speaker 1: streets West. I'm gonna do you the favor that Dr
Speaker 1: Corrigan did for me. I'm gonna let you down easy.
Speaker 1: Nobody knows. Is there a method to quantify the number
Speaker 1: of rats in the city. The answers, No, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of tunnels lower feet and they go every single
Speaker 1: which way, and you're piled on top of each other,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of thing. They're all shaped mammals. And
Speaker 1: so when we built our cities around the world, all
Speaker 1: our cities are like this. And it's not that the
Speaker 1: rats are living inside the pipes, but when we put
Speaker 1: in a pipe, we have to create a space for that. No,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, that is not an acceptable answer in a
Speaker 1: podcast episode dedicated to getting rid of rats and cities.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna need at least a ballpark figure. This
Speaker 1: is the best we can do for you. A study
Speaker 1: from published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
Speaker 1: estimates that they're about two million rats in New York City.
Speaker 1: And I have to say this study from has gotten
Speaker 1: a lot of play if you google facts and figures.
Speaker 1: But how many rats are in America's big cities. This
Speaker 1: is all you are going to get. I asked Jared
Speaker 1: Brown and d C the same question. Here's what he
Speaker 1: told me. There's no way you can know how many
Speaker 1: rests in that area, you know. Um, so we just
Speaker 1: measure the complise, but we know is an increase in
Speaker 1: companise those increasing rats. Right, That's basically what Dr Corrigan
Speaker 1: was telling me. There's no way to know how many
Speaker 1: rats there are because there's no way to know where
Speaker 1: all the rats are. There's just too many places that
Speaker 1: they could be. So the amazing thing about the rat
Speaker 1: and its space is if if the skull can fit through,
Speaker 1: the rest of the body can do the limbo. So
Speaker 1: all you need is a half inch height for a
Speaker 1: skull tell millimeters one basketball space can harbor an entire
Speaker 1: family of rats because they like to hugger mugger together
Speaker 1: and they all get really close and inside the basketball
Speaker 1: they're like, this is a great apartment, right, they can
Speaker 1: do that. They're true New Yorkers. True, they are the
Speaker 1: true New Yorkers, and true you know every place after
Speaker 1: the break, rats hate this one simple fix. So all
Speaker 1: over the world, you know, um, in my contacts and
Speaker 1: my travels for cities I do surveys in where populations
Speaker 1: are up globally. We're not sure why, but you know,
Speaker 1: the scientists we get together and we we think along
Speaker 1: these lines global warming. The winters are less severe. Repeatedly
Speaker 1: for the past decade, We've had the warmest decade in
Speaker 1: old history. That's one thing, too, is human populations are increasing.
Speaker 1: More humans, more trash, more protein. Cities are getting older,
Speaker 1: whatever city you want to pick, they're getting older. As
Speaker 1: the city gets older, the infrastructures keep deteriorating. That's why
Speaker 1: I pointed out the patris here. So as buildings deteriorate,
Speaker 1: the foundations deteriorate. The soon as deteriorate, infrastructure deteriorates, we
Speaker 1: create more inaccessible harbridges for an animal that only these
Speaker 1: twelve millimeters. At this point in the walk about, I
Speaker 1: was kind of starting to get it why killing the
Speaker 1: ones that we can find just doesn't quite cut it.
Speaker 1: As far as controlling the population, Dr Corrigan told me
Speaker 1: an example of a better solution was in a pretty
Speaker 1: surprising place. The pandemic. You know, the city was shut down.
Speaker 1: All the cities at Philadelphia shut down, all the East
Speaker 1: Coast cities the West coast. All our cities shut down
Speaker 1: for a couple of months. We were like no restaurants.
Speaker 1: The rats themselves were stressed. So when they used to
Speaker 1: come out at night in any city and and try
Speaker 1: to get food in what used to be every night
Speaker 1: the dumpster had food, well no more dumpster. They need
Speaker 1: food just like we need food. So I was doing
Speaker 1: surveys right after the pandemic shutdown. I saw rats going
Speaker 1: at each other. I saw rats attacking each other. I
Speaker 1: saw colonies completely leave the area for parts of known
Speaker 1: probably residential trash quite frankly. But after that we hurt
Speaker 1: their numbers. We don't know by how many, probably hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands, maybe millions of rats to come during that period. Also,
Speaker 1: Gerard Brown and d C told me earlier that COVID
Speaker 1: led to a huge surge in residential trash because so
Speaker 1: many people were working from home. So in d C,
Speaker 1: at least in those early days, neighborhood rats had a
Speaker 1: field day. But I guess the bottom line here is
Speaker 1: that there's a direct link between the amount of garbage
Speaker 1: in an area and the size of the rat population.
Speaker 1: Rats cannot thrive without nearby trash. Remember how we said
Speaker 1: they only travel a few hundred feet. That means in
Speaker 1: a place like New York City, rats who had made
Speaker 1: restaurant leftovers their food staple were down on their luck.
Speaker 1: In Yeah, and rat populations here in New York actually
Speaker 1: felt a historic lows during lockdown, But as the city
Speaker 1: came back, so did the rat population big time. Rebecca
Speaker 1: and I got a chance to speak to New York
Speaker 1: City Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tish. She told us that budget
Speaker 1: cuts to the apartment early in the pandemic made a
Speaker 1: city already famous, fulfilled even dirtier, which made a perfect
Speaker 1: breeding ground for rat resurgence. I think most New Yorkers
Speaker 1: noticed that the city got meaningfully dirtier, and we are
Speaker 1: intent on cleaning it up. One of the reasons the
Speaker 1: city got dirtier during the pandemic, to my mind, is
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of it, the cleanliness function was
Speaker 1: completely defunded from the Department of Sanitation, and those are
Speaker 1: their basic bread and butter services, So things like clearing
Speaker 1: out the litter baskets so that they don't overflow on
Speaker 1: street corners, sweeping the streets so that our curb lines
Speaker 1: aren't riddled with litter, cleaning the highway on an off ramps.
Speaker 1: Those basic things were completely cut at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the pandemic in March or April, and Mayor Adams not
Speaker 1: allly restored them, but funded them at the highest levels
Speaker 1: that New York City has ever seen. And Mary Eric
Speaker 1: Adams famously hates rats. Everyone that knows me they know
Speaker 1: one thing. I hate rats. I hate rats. I'm terrified
Speaker 1: rats so much so that New York is actually hiring
Speaker 1: a rats Are to take charge of all things. Wrote
Speaker 1: in Control related the job postings asking for someone and
Speaker 1: I quote somewhat bloodthirsty who's able to burrow into the
Speaker 1: depths of city government to get the job done. Commissioner
Speaker 1: Tish says that managing our waste equals managing the rat population,
Speaker 1: and New York produces a lot of trash. To give
Speaker 1: you some context, keep in mind that every day New
Speaker 1: Yorkers put out twenty four million pounds of trash and
Speaker 1: recycling on our curbs. That's every day, every single day.
Speaker 1: That is two million pounds that sits our curbs for
Speaker 1: fourteen hours a day. It's a lot, but that's about
Speaker 1: to change. A new policy that starts in April is
Speaker 1: really going to cut down on the amount of time
Speaker 1: those bags sit out, and the rats, they are not
Speaker 1: going to be happy about it. We know that one
Speaker 1: third of all material in the black bags is organic waste,
Speaker 1: it's food, and so you can see how shrinking the
Speaker 1: amount of time that those black bags sit on the
Speaker 1: curb will actually make quite a meaningful difference in how
Speaker 1: the city looks and fields, to say nothing of the
Speaker 1: fact that the black bags right now serve as the
Speaker 1: all you can eat buffet for rats. It's like the
Speaker 1: all night, all you can eat buffet for rats, and
Speaker 1: so one of the goals of shrinking the amount of
Speaker 1: time that the bags spend on the curb is shutting
Speaker 1: down that all night, all you can eat rat buffet,
Speaker 1: or at least dramatically limiting it's ours. So here in
Speaker 1: d see the impact of garbage and garbage collection is
Speaker 1: definitely on people's minds, but we haven't seen a change
Speaker 1: like the one in New York yet. There are plenty
Speaker 1: of residents, though, who want to get ahead of this
Speaker 1: problem by changing up the way we handle our trash,
Speaker 1: like Kim Patterson, who is the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for Brightwood.
Speaker 1: She was one of a bunch of community members who
Speaker 1: came by while the road in control team serviced the
Speaker 1: block that's getting worse. There's garbage. You can see that
Speaker 1: the garbage bins are not secure. Um the owner pays
Speaker 1: the fines and still doesn't secure the cans. The residents
Speaker 1: are terrified to throw their trash there. They open the door.
Speaker 1: There's rats are trash cans are plastic. The ronus eat
Speaker 1: through them. Just give us a new can. We have
Speaker 1: all these rules. There's a hole in the can that
Speaker 1: the homeowner did not cause it was the rat. Also,
Speaker 1: the trash cans that are public, they are open. There's
Speaker 1: no lead. Let's get some type of control where the
Speaker 1: trash can be in closed so the rest don't fest
Speaker 1: and feast every night. Yeah, isn' is all well and
Speaker 1: good as an immediate solution. If you've got a problem,
Speaker 1: you've got to handle it. But controlling the rats food supply,
Speaker 1: ak the trash supply can cut their population down at
Speaker 1: the source. The only problem with that it requires a
Speaker 1: serious amount of buy in from all of us. If
Speaker 1: you give the rap one bad property out of ten
Speaker 1: beautiful properties, that one bad property will feed the entire block. Rats,
Speaker 1: just that one property, the whole block goes down based
Speaker 1: on one bad neighbor. It takes everybody to be honest
Speaker 1: with you, and most people do not want to be
Speaker 1: involved in rat control duties. When they get up every day,
Speaker 1: it's the last thing on their radar screen, you know.
Speaker 1: And there's the weakness nobody gets. Some say, gee, I
Speaker 1: wonder if I should do a rats are in my
Speaker 1: own property and cut it off At the past everyone says, gee,
Speaker 1: I have rats. They pick up the phone, pick up
Speaker 1: the Yellow Pages, so to speak, and call somebody put
Speaker 1: out empois Thanks to Catherine, Rebecca and Sam, and thanks
Speaker 1: to you for listening to us here at The Big Take.
Speaker 1: It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio.
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Speaker 1: comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising
Speaker 1: producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergolina, our senior
Speaker 1: producer is Katherine Fink, our producer is Rebecca Chassa, and
Speaker 1: our associate producer is Sam Gobauer. Raphael I'm Seely is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin.
Speaker 1: I'm Westcasova will be back on Monday with another big take.
Speaker 1: Have a great weekend into a pot b