Welcome to New York City. Home of Pizza Rat, Subway Rat, and Escalator Rat. This is a town of rats, and those rats have to be
studied by people with flashlights. One of those people is Rodentologist Bobby
Corrigan. I'm an urban rodentologist so I study just the rodents of cities. Nobody knows exactly how many rats there are in the city but it's estimated that
there could be millions and that's great news, because the more rats you have the
better. I'm totally kidding, obviously. It's hard to imagine a creature that's
more despised than a street rat, but is it really their fault? Rats carry some
pretty gnarly diseases like E. Coli, Salmonella, and West Nile virus, as well
as rat bite fever which, despite how it sounds, was not an obscure 50s dance
craze. In 2014 Columbia University studied rats inside residential
buildings in New York and found that they're even grosser than we thought. The research confirmed that urban rats carried 15 pathogens and 18 viruses that
had never been seen before in the city. I went to Chinatown in Manhattan with
Bobby, to see what's enabling these critters to live their best rat life. I look for what I call you know conducive conditions I mean just look at the
gutter it's especially by five, six o'clock this
gutter is a complete buffet. Here's a bag of food trash. Where'd it come from? Who knows. You can see this little basket is just, it's a simple ladder right up this in
and in and then out. And then... a nice rat cave. So Bobby, what else helps them?
Trains, planes, automobiles, sewer lines, electrical lines, you name it and this
animal is usually taking advantage of it. Any crack or crevice that is a half an
inch in height and width is easy opportunity for the rat to dark into. Let's not get run over. You'll notice here this big giant gap
below this door, a rat would not even have to duck there getting to whatever's
on the other side of that that warm door. It's as simple as putting in a rat strip
at the base of a door, which costs all of $85, so it'd be silly not to do
that. You know the word rodent means "to gnaw" so anything that's linear like a
wire, on an airplane, or a wire on a subway, or the wire that's in your own
home, then they're gnawing that and that's a problem. It's actually a really big
problem. Every year in the U.S. it's estimated that rats cause nineteen
billion dollars worth of damage. So how much of our behavior contributes to the
success of the city rat? It's a lot. The amount of solid waste humans generate
every year has been steadily rising for decades. Our behavior is one of the
biggest reasons rats prosper in cities. If something as simple as installing a
door strip can help keep rats in check, then why do we spend our time making
viral videos about how disgusting they are, instead of fixing the problem? We can be really lazy and we don't think through things. There's lots of things we
can do on a daily basis within a city that would deny the rat it's existence.
So, I'm just one person out of say eight to ten million New Yorkers. What can I do? It's actually pretty simple. Everybody generates somewhere between
four and six pounds of trash every 24 hours. Be a smart mammal. Whatever you do with your trash, ask yourself can the rats get
to it? The city's helping out too. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a 32
million dollar plan last year that would introduce new rat proof trash cans so
no more wire basket rat ladders. And there'd be better trash management and
pickup as well. We tend to take care of pests after they become a problem, in
other words we let them get established and then we hire exterminators or we go
out, we buy some traps. All of that is after the fact instead of doing it
proactively, I don't know maybe we should call ourselves homoreactus. So is this
a hopeless fight? Should we just all lay down in the trash-filled
gutter and give up? It is not true that you can never get rid of rats. That's not
true. You know, what what is true is they can
be managed through human behavior. This species is very industrious, hard-working if you will. Oh they have the ability to adapt to
environmental conditions that can be pretty extreme, but they're overpopulated
in many cases because human beings make it so good for them, quite frankly. So in
many ways, will the rat maybe outlive us? I'm gonna think it will. I'm gonna think
it will
I'm posting this here because I believe the topic and issue of rat infestations in urban areas (and the methods that are needed to deal with the problem) revolves around urban planning.
Yes, the actions of people plays a role, the laziness of people not to properly take out their trash, to litter, to otherwise provide free meals to rats is important to the topic.
At the same time, the video also showcases several urban features that contribute to rats successfully being able to survive and thrive in cities and it's down to how the cities are constructed. And even in minor things like how trash bins are engineered.
It still boggles my mind at how 3rd world NY's entire garbage system is.