623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?

Summary

Freakonomics Radio: Episode 623 - Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?

In Episode 623 of Freakonomics Radio, host Stephen Dubner delves into New York City's ongoing battle against its pervasive rat population. Titled "Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?", the episode uncovers the multifaceted strategies, challenges, and insights surrounding this urban pest control effort.

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1. Introduction to New York City's Rat Infestation

The episode opens with Stephen Dubner meeting Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist and former rodent researcher now employed by New York City. Corrigan provides a vivid depiction of the rat-infested environment beneath the city streets.

Stephen Dubner [00:03]: "Sometimes we go to war with our neighbors, and sometimes those neighbors are rats."

<timestamp>: [00:09] Bobby Corrigan: "Everyone thinks there's a rat world below our feet, and to some degree, that's true."

Corrigan explains how rats tunnel beneath sidewalks, causing infrastructural damages like collapsed curbs.

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2. Understanding the Rat Ecosystem

Traversing Lower Manhattan, Corrigan points out signs of active rodent activity, including sebum stains—dark charcoal marks left by rats as they traverse walls.

Bobby Corrigan [02:09]: "Rats have a very specific subterranean environment they need."

He emphasizes the complexity of rat behavior and their adaptability to urban environments.

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3. The Declaration of War: NYC's Rat Summit

New York City, grappling with an escalating rat problem, has officially declared war on these pests. This initiative began with a historic rat summit, aiming to bring together experts and municipal leaders to strategize effective control measures.

Kathy Karate [03:28]: "An ounce of prevention's worth, a pound of cure."

Kathy Karate, the newly appointed citywide director of rodent mitigation, plays a pivotal role in orchestrating these efforts.

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4. Traditional vs. Modern Rat Control Methods

The episode critiques traditional rat control methods such as poisons and traps, highlighting their environmental and ethical drawbacks.

Kaylee Byers [08:16]: "Poisons are probably the last resort that should be approached when it comes to rat control."

Kaylee Byers, a rat researcher, advocates for more humane and sustainable approaches, including birth control methods. However, she points out the logistical challenges of implementing birth control in open rodent populations.

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5. Learning from Alberta: A Rat-Free Province

As a contrast, the episode explores Alberta's successful rat control program, which has kept the province virtually rat-free since the 1950s through strict regulations and public involvement.

Robert Sullivan [16:31]: "People are desperate and they want to know what our secret is."

Karen Wickerson, Alberta's rat and pest specialist, attributes their success to proactive measures and comprehensive public education.

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6. New York City's Comprehensive Rat Summit

The rat summit in New York City featured presentations from various experts, including innovative technologies like remote rat sensors and public health approaches.

Bobby Corrigan [14:41]: "We can leave these sensors in place. They're going to work 24/7, 365."

The summit underscored the necessity of a unified, data-driven approach to effectively manage rat populations.

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7. The Trash Transition: Secure Bins over Plastic Bags

A significant component of NYC's rat control strategy involves overhauling the city's waste management system. Commissioner Jessica Tisch outlines the transition from flimsy plastic bags to sturdy, rat-proof containers.

Jessica Tisch [28:03]: "The single biggest swing that you can take at the rat problem in New York City is getting the trash bags off of the streets."

This initiative aims to reduce rats' access to food by ensuring all trash is securely contained, thereby addressing one of the primary attractants for rat infestations.

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8. Challenges in Implementation and Public Behavior

Despite the promising plans, the episode highlights several challenges, including public adherence to new waste management protocols and the durability of the new containers.

Bobby Corrigan [34:20]: "Everything's going to have its pluses and minuses."

Issues such as broken bin lids and rats adapting to new measures underscore the complexity of eradicating the rat problem entirely.

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9. Insights from Author Robert Sullivan

Robert Sullivan, author of Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, shares his perspective on the human-rat dichotomy and the societal implications of pest control.

Robert Sullivan [21:03]: "We try to look at places differently from maybe how they've been looked at."

Sullivan discusses the anthropological aspects of rat infestations, drawing parallels between rat behavior and human societal patterns.

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10. Expert Opinions and Future Directions

Economist Ed Glaeser weighs in on the feasibility of creating a rat-free urban environment, emphasizing the importance of measurement and data in assessing the effectiveness of rat control measures.

Ed Glaeser [40:26]: "Impacting the food supply seems sensible, though that requires New Yorkers to be very attentive about their trash."

Glaeser suggests innovative solutions like heat vision technologies for better rat detection and advocates for evidence-based strategies to guide future efforts.

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11. Cultural and Ethical Considerations

The episode touches on unconventional solutions, such as the potential for rats to be consumed as a food source, drawing cultural comparisons to practices in other countries.

Bobby Corrigan [44:43]: "Technically, did I eat rat? Yes. But did I eat Norway rat? Yes. But did I eat wild Norway rat off the streets that may have come out of a sewer? I would be very dumb to do that."

While this idea remains largely untested in New York City, it opens the discussion on sustainable and ethical pest control methods.

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12. Conclusion and Looking Ahead

As the episode wraps up, Corrigan reflects on the shared behavioral traits between humans and rats, suggesting a deeper connection in the humanization of pest control.

Bobby Corrigan [48:10]: "Animal behaviorist will say, you know, when we study rat colonies, we're studying ourselves."

The episode concludes by teasing the next installment, which will explore rats as pets, further expanding the discourse on human-rat relationships.

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Notable Quotes:

• Bobby Corrigan [02:09]: "Rats have a very specific subterranean environment they need."
• Kaylee Byers [08:16]: "Poisons are probably the last resort that should be approached when it comes to rat control."
• Jessica Tisch [28:03]: "The single biggest swing that you can take at the rat problem in New York City is getting the trash bags off of the streets."
• Robert Sullivan [21:03]: "We try to look at places differently from maybe how they've been looked at."
• Ed Glaeser [40:26]: "Impacting the food supply seems sensible, though that requires New Yorkers to be very attentive about their trash."

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Final Thoughts:

Episode 623 provides a comprehensive examination of New York City's struggle with its rat population, blending expert interviews, innovative strategies, and ethical considerations. By highlighting both traditional and modern approaches, the episode portrays the complexity of urban pest control and the ongoing quest for sustainable solutions.

For those intrigued by the hidden dynamics of urban life and the intricate battle between humans and rats, this episode offers valuable insights and a thought-provoking narrative.

Transcript

[Stephen Dubner]

Sometimes we go to war with our neighbors, and sometimes those neighbors are rats.

[Bobby Corrigan]

Okay, so we're outside in New York City looking at what we call active rodent signs, or ars.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is Bobby Corrigan. He is an urban rodentologist, a former rodent researcher who now works for the city of New York.

[Bobby Corrigan]

Everyone thinks there's a rat world below our feet, and to some degree, that's true. But rats have a very specific subterranean environment they need.

[Stephen Dubner]

It is a cold and windy afternoon in Lower Manhattan, one of the oldest parts of the city. Most of the humans have scurried back to their offices from lunch. At the intersection of Murray and Church streets, Corrigan points to a sidewalk curb that has collapsed in on itself.

[Bobby Corrigan]

And that's because the rats nearby got below the sidewalk, tunneled into this area, dug out the soil so they could have a burrow in this area, and now there's nothing supporting these heavy concrete pieces. It's expensive to put in a new curb.

[Stephen Dubner]

And where did these burrowing rats come from?

[Bobby Corrigan]

Just five feet away, we have the proverbial catch basin that the stormwater drains down. And sometimes you'll see rats come right out of these sewers. Their home is in the sewer in the middle of the street.

[Stephen Dubner]

So you've got rats in the sewers, rats burrowing under the sidewalks. What else can we see?

[Bobby Corrigan]

I want to show you something much more interesting. You'll notice along this building perimeter, if you let your eyes just continue along, you will see the gray concrete. That's light, but next to the building, you'll see this dark charcoal stain. That's linear, right? The stain goes around, hugs the building. That is from rats. That's what's called a sebum stain. Rodents like to hug walls so they feel safe and secure. So that's a very clear sign. And if you came here between 10 and 2 tonight, chances are good you might see a rat running along there.

[Stephen Dubner]

Bobby Corrigan, as you can tell, is something of an enthusiast when it comes to rats. Although his enthusiasm is a strange blend of appreciator and exterminator.

[Bobby Corrigan]

I want to be humane to this animal because I respect it. But if you put a rat on my airplane when I'm flying over the seas to Paris, I want that rat dead in any way possible.

[Stephen Dubner]

He acknowledges that his work has its disadvantages.

[Bobby Corrigan]

My wife, when we go out to eat before we step into a new restaurant, she'll say, is it safe? These days, I wish I didn't know what I know.

[Stephen Dubner]

When you walk around these old city streets, With Corrigan, it's easy to feel that it's a rat's world and we're just living in it. As we learned last week in part one of this series, New York and other cities are struggling to control their rat populations. The problem here got so bad that the city declared war on rats today on Freakonomics Radio. How do you execute such a war? This one began with a summit. Wow.

[Eric Adams]

I didn't realize we didn't get so many people showing up to talk about rats.

[Stephen Dubner]

We will hear about some battle tactics.

[Kathy Karate]

An ounce of prevention's worth, a pound of cure.

[Stephen Dubner]

But what if it's too late for prevention?

[Jessica Tisch]

New York City is not going to be the first city to do this. In fact, we are definitely going to be one of the last.

[Stephen Dubner]

We'll hear about rat traps, rat poisons, rat birth control.

[Kaylee Byers]

You know, birth control on paper sounds pretty darn smart, right?

[Stephen Dubner]

And we will consider some other ideas, if prepared well.

[Ed Glaeser]

Sure, I'm open. Is someone actually serving Norway rat?

[Stephen Dubner]

You want fries with that rat? Part two of Sympathy for the Rat begins now.

[Robert Sullivan]

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

[Stephen Dubner]

Bobby Corrigan was born in Brooklyn, but his family moved out to the suburbs of Long island when he was a kid. This suited Bobby. Well.

[Kaylee Byers]

I guess I've always been a nature nerd. I was the kid that was in the backyard frying the ants with the magnifying glass while my brother played football. And so I've always followed that path of creepy crawlers and animals that were mysterious but cool and things we didn't know much about.

[Stephen Dubner]

Still, he didn't plan on a life devoted to extermination.

[Kaylee Byers]

You know, it's kind of crazy. I came from a poor family. I had no money to go to college, so I answered an ad in the newspaper for an exterminator in New York City. And the new guy gets the good job, right? So they put me in the sewers to hang rat poison. I was frightened to death, to be honest with you.

[Stephen Dubner]

But that fear only boosted his interest. After working as an exterminator for a few years, Corrigan did go to college, and he studied under a prominent entomologist named Austin Fishman, a pest control pioneer, Corrigan calls him. After that, Corrigan joined a graduate program at Purdue University in their school of agriculture.

[Kaylee Byers]

So when I got into grad school and I signed on to studying rats as my species, I moved into barns that were full of rats. This was in Indiana, and farmers would Tell me, you know, we're always fighting rats. So I asked if I could just move into their barn. I would camp literally on the floor inside these rat infested barns. And over time, it's a whole crazy experience that you get to realize just how amazing these mammals are. I have to say, looking back, it was some of the most exciting years of my life. I say that with all seriousness.

[Stephen Dubner]

Corgan wound up getting a PhD from Purdue in rodent pest management and he stayed out there for a while as a professor. But eventually he felt the siren call of his hometown and he took a job with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In a way, this was a very rat like behavior, as rats experience that same pull toward home.

[Kaylee Byers]

I use the term long rodent. We all know what long Covid means. Well, long rodent is, you know, once the colonies have become comfortable and had many, many families, they're laying down all kinds of pheromones with their bodies. They'll call any new rats into that area. They also have memories of their own neighborhoods, just like we do. So those neighborhoods, once they become really infested, there's a reason for that. The rats have found this works for us and that's going to continue and be passed on to generation after generation.

[Stephen Dubner]

From the rat perspective, that sounds lovely. From generation to generation, the kind of thing that humans cherish. But from the human perspective, rats are rarely a thing to cherish. Most people see them as disgusting pests. At the very least, some people think of them as mass murderers. Although, as we heard in part one of this series, some scientists have recently exonerated rats on the charge of having spread the Black Death in Europe. Still, the rat's reputation is terrible. So if you are facing the kind of multi generational infestation that Bobby Corrigan was just talking about, what do you do? The most obvious tool in many cases is poison.

[Kaylee Byers]

Poisons, they're called rodenticides, meaning to kill rodents, are a primary tool that everybody uses. Try to kill any rats that they see around their property.

[Stephen Dubner]

But Corrigan says this obvious choice is often the wrong choice.

[Kaylee Byers]

You would want to start first with not attracting the rats with food or clutter in the first place. Poisons are probably the last resort that should be approached when it comes to rat control. It's an environmental thing.

[Stephen Dubner]

A good example of the environmental threat of rat poison is the story of Flaco the owl, a beautiful Eurasian eagle owl who lived in Central Park Zoo in New York City. Flaco became a celebrity when, when in 2023, he escaped from the zoo thanks to a vandal cutting a hole in the cage, and he took up residence in Manhattan. There were concerns at first that he wouldn't be able to survive outside of captivity, but he seemed to be thriving.

[Kaylee Byers]

When I read that, I said, whoa, I am worried about this owl, because I know the owls of the parks. They are preying upon rats and mice out in the parks and maybe feeding on these poisons.

[Stephen Dubner]

After nine months on the outside, Flocko was killed when he flew into a building on the Upper west side. A postmortem showed that he had debilitating levels of rat poison in his system. But it's not just escaped zoo animals who are endangered by rat poison. Dogs are. Children are. Like Bobby Corrigan said, poison should probably be a last resort, not a first. And how does Corrigan feel about rat traps?

[Kaylee Byers]

Traps, if they're applied by someone who's experienced, and it really does take experience, the rat's a very wily mammal, and it's very smart. It's not as simple as going to the hardware store, buying a rat trap, putting it out with a glob of peanut butter and saying, that's it. So traps can be useful when done by experienced people, but we have to acknowledge that many of them are simply inhumane, especially glue traps. You know, if you ever sit and watch a rat or a mouse struggling on glue, it's not a pretty sight whatsoever.

[Stephen Dubner]

We talked in part one of this series about the thin line between animals we love and treat kindly and the animals we consider pests and treat violently. It is true that some people do keep rats as pets, and of course, we've used them for years as research subjects in medicine, psychology, even space travel. But we mostly think of them as a thing to be eliminated, even though they are like us mammals and not so different from the mammals we celebrate and love. So does it make sense to torture a rat when you wouldn't torture a cat or a dog? Another rat mitigation solution that's been gaining traction is birth control.

[Kaylee Byers]

So it has great optics. You know, we don't have to use those bad poisons and the traps that are inhumane. So why not just, quote, give them the pillow? But you have to get the birth control materials to large groups of mammals. And in cities, we have what's called open populations of rats. That means you can have colonies living in sewers, rats living in parks, rats living in basements, rats living in subways. How do you get the birth control to all these colonies? Are you Bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon, I guess, is the best way to put it.

[Stephen Dubner]

So how do you keep down the rat population in a place like New York? The unfortunate answer seems to be that there is no one clear solution. Part of the problem is that rat data is usually unreliable. This is frustrating for someone like Bobby Corrigan.

[Kaylee Byers]

We haven't addressed this issue in 300 years. We've looked at these rats as just kill them, just put out poison, just trap them. No science has gone into this, but the compass is finally pointing in the right direction.

[Stephen Dubner]

And what makes Corrigan say this, that the compass is pointing in the right direction? Well, last fall, New York City hosted the first ever National Urban Rat Summit.

[Kaylee Byers]

You know, the credit here goes to Kathy Karate.

[Stephen Dubner]

Karate is the new citywide director of rodent mitigation, also known as the rat Czar.

[Kaylee Byers]

Within our first couple of weeks of being in the position of rat czar, we met for coffee, and Kathy said, what if we bring in old scientists from around the US and even maybe around the world to talk about this issue? And from there, it took off.

[Stephen Dubner]

Like Bobby Corrigan, Kathy Karate is both exterminator and appreciator. She knows the animal well. I asked her if she could explain the secret of the rat's success in New York.

[Kathy Karate]

Yes, their fecundity is their superpower. Rat's gestation period is about 21 days. You know, three weeks to a litter. You can have eight to 12 pups in that litter, and then the females in that litter are ready to breed at about 3 months of age again. So we just are talking exponential growth, and that's by design, evolutionary. They want to produce as much young as possible because they're a prey species. The average life expectancy of a New York City rat, a wild rat, as we'd call it, is 8 to 12 months. If you take that same species in the laboratory setting, it's about three years. It's a tough life out there in the wild. So the more offspring you produce, the better chance you have of passing those genes on.

[Stephen Dubner]

I spoke with Karate shortly before the inaugural Rat Summit last fall. I asked her for a preview.

[Kathy Karate]

We've put together this summit to bring together the leading academic minds in this space. The researchers studying urban rats, and then different municipal leaders. So we have folks joining us from Boston, D.C. seattle. Everyone's grappling with this. No city is like, you know what? We're okay with what's going on.

[Stephen Dubner]

The day of the rat summit arrived. Mayor Eric Adams helped set the stage he began by praising Kathy Karate.

[Eric Adams]

I am so happy I have a four star general who is working on finally winning the war on rats. We will make an impact and if we do so, we're going to improve the health and the mental stability of everyday people in this city. So thank you for being here. Let's be energetic, let's share our ideas, let's figure out how we unified against what I consider to be public enemy number one, Mickey and his crew.

[Stephen Dubner]

And then the presentations got underway. Our friend Bobby Corrigan gave a talk called Remote Rat Sensor Technology. Public Health Canaries in the coal mine.

[Bobby Corrigan]

We can leave these sensors in place. They're going to work 24 7, 365.

[Kaylee Byers]

No benefits are needed. You know, we're not going to pay them overtime, none of that. But they're giving us data.

[Stephen Dubner]

A rat researcher named Kaylee Byers gave a talk called More Than Pests. Rats as a Public and Mental health Issue. Byers teaches at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. She opened her talk by showing a global map of the rat's reach. Only a very few places are spared. Antarctica, for instance, and a big rectangle in the middle of Canada.

[Karen Wickerson]

You might be looking at this rat map and saying, huh, what's going on over here? This little blank space? That's Alberta, the rat free province of Canada. We do actually have rats. There's many fewer of them, but Alberta has marketed itself as the rat free province.

[Stephen Dubner]

And here's the person responsible for keeping Alberta rat free.

[Robert Sullivan]

Karen Wickerson. I'm the rat and pest specialist for the province of Alberta.

[Stephen Dubner]

Wickerson was not able to make the rat summit, although she did visit New York not long after we spoke with her in a studio.

[Robert Sullivan]

So I'm in charge of overseeing the program, which is provincial wide. I coordinate response to rat reports, rat infestations if we have them. I work with people who are part of the rat patrol at the Alberta Saskatchewan border. They check along the border twice a year and they report back to me if they do find rats at all.

[Stephen Dubner]

Alberta is just over 250,000 square miles. That's roughly the same size as Texas where there are many rats rats. But Alberta says it does not have a single breeding population of rats. Karen Wickerson gives some credit to the public.

[Robert Sullivan]

Albertans are very proud. I've had people go to great lengths to figure out how to report a rat sighting. And they get a hold of me and they say, oh, I know I'm supposed to report this. I want you to know I saw a rat at this location, Wickerson told.

[Stephen Dubner]

Us that she gets about 500 reports of rat sightings a year, but that only around 30 of them are legitimate. How can this be? Apparently, when rats are rare, a lot of people don't even know what a rat looks like.

[Robert Sullivan]

If you've lived in Alberta your whole life, you probably can't identify one when you see it. I can talk about the reports we receive of people misidentifying them as muskrats. They're a larger rodent, have a waddle long tail. We receive a lot of reports of them where people think they are rats.

[Stephen Dubner]

So what does it take to be essentially rat free? Alberta has run a strict anti rat program since the 1950s. The Norway rat was migrating then in great numbers from the eastern part of Canada. And farmers out west saw the potential for crop damage.

[Robert Sullivan]

Because of the damage they could cause, they declared him a pest. Being a pest, an agricultural pest in Alberta means that every Albertan is required to control them.

[Stephen Dubner]

Among rat people, Alberta is famous the way Pine Valley is famous among Gulf people as a remote and sanctified place, almost too good for this world.

[Robert Sullivan]

People are desperate and they want to know what our secret is. I always say, like, we're at such an advantage because the program started right when rats arrived to our boundary. We prevented them from spreading into the province and establishing. So for me to comment on populations now that do exist, you know, it's hard for me to really give advice. I would say that public education is always critical. It's challenging. I do really feel for people in other jurisdictions.

[Stephen Dubner]

So how did Karen Wickerson enjoy her visit to the super ratty jurisdiction of New York?

[Robert Sullivan]

I found it fascinating because I don't see rats on the street in Alberta. So my first night, I was walking out for dinner, and I have to say I was delighted when I saw a rat munching on a bag of garbage.

[Stephen Dubner]

As a New Yorker, I am of course proud that we keep coming up with new ways to entertain visitors. But we should talk about the garbage.

[Jessica Tisch]

We dump all this trash in our curbs and we sit around and we wonder why we have a rat problem.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio. When we first set out to make this series on rats, we were inspired by what you might call a foundational text, a book called Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan. I remembered reading an excerpt of the book in the New York Times Magazine when It was published in 2004. And then recently a dear old friend of mine died and I inherited some of his books. Rats was one of them. My friend Ivan was the kind of reader who likes to underline interesting passages of a book as he goes. When I sat down to read his copy of Rats, I found that roughly half of it was underlined. And that's what I told Robert Sullivan when I called him up.

[Jessica Tisch]

What a lovely thing to hear. So, yeah, it's tough to be known as a rat guy, but then right after that, it's good to be known as a rat guy.

[Stephen Dubner]

I asked Sullivan to introduce himself for the recording.

[Jessica Tisch]

My name's Robert Sullivan and I write things.

[Stephen Dubner]

And I asked for a bit more detail.

[Jessica Tisch]

My name is Robert Sullivan and I write books and magazine articles. And I write about places that maybe people haven't looked at, or I try to look at places differently from maybe how they've been looked at.

[Stephen Dubner]

So you have written a lot of articles? Several books. Are you still best known for rats, do you think?

[Jessica Tisch]

The idea that I'm best known for anything is an idea I struggle with.

[Stephen Dubner]

Hey, you want a Guggenheim?

[Jessica Tisch]

I did. It's not clear. They could have been thinking of another Robert Sullivan.

[Stephen Dubner]

I asked Sullivan to explain how he had come to write about Rats.

[Jessica Tisch]

The concrete reason was I was on a reporting job. I was covering a whale hunt for the New York Times Magazine. I was out on a reservation, the McCaw nations reservation, out at the very tip of the United States of America, the continental United States, the Pacific Northwest. And. And people were there to protest the hunting of whales.

[Stephen Dubner]

And this was a Native American tribe that had kind of a grandfathered in license to hunt them.

[Jessica Tisch]

They had it in their treaty rights. There were people on the reservation who believed that maybe we shouldn't hunt whales right now. There were also people who thought they should. There were also people who thought that whether they should or they shouldn't was a moot point because it's a matter of tribal sovereignty. And this was an incredible thing to be witness of this debate and this action. While I was there, I met a bunch of people who were working for animal rights groups. And one of them said, I'm not gonna be here tomorrow for the protest. I've gotta go back to Seattle, gotta go back to our offices. I asked why? They said, because we have pest control people coming. And I said, well, what are you doing? And they say, we have rats. I said, are you gonna trap and release them or what? Cause I just figured. And they said, no, they're rats, we're going to have the exterminator take care of them. It just suddenly dawned on me in my abstract pursuit of where is the division between what we think of as natural and not natural? That this was a line in the philosophical sand.

[Stephen Dubner]

So that's what led Robert Sullivan to write about rats. But it is the depth of the reporting and the thinking and writing that makes his book spectacular. It is brash and clever and interesting on every page. I can see why Ivan couldn't stop underlining. The book feels like a cross between punk anthropology or rodentology, I guess. But there is a lot of anthro in there and cheeky encyclopedia. Rat control programs, Sullivan writes, are like diets in that cities are always trying a new one. In the city, rats and men live in conflict, one side scurrying from the other or destroying the other's habitat. An unending and brutish war. Rat stories are war stories, and they are told in conversation and on the news, in dispatches from the front that is all around us. I asked Sullivan what he thought of New York Mayor Eric Adams war on rats and the recent rat summit.

[Jessica Tisch]

Typically, I try to ignore what mayors say about rats.

[Stephen Dubner]

He was indicted not long after. Do you think that was a coincidence or no? Do you think the rats have the pull to make that happen?

[Jessica Tisch]

I think that the history of rat control in New York City and many cities is aligned with the history of mayors wanting to get attention for being great and taking care of things. Just starting way back, Mayor Lindsay gave out metal garbage cans. Mayor Dinkins built housing. Very effective way to help with rat problems. Mayor Giuliani took trash cans off the streets in Harlem. It's a kind of tributary, I guess, of the broken windows theory that says that if you take the trash cans off the street, people won't throw trash on the streets. Mayor Bloomberg is the rat data guy. He was all about where the data is for rats, like where rat bite reports are, which is a complicated statistic.

[Stephen Dubner]

Why?

[Jessica Tisch]

Because people who are getting bitten by rats might not report them, might not have the wherewithal or the, frankly, resources to go about doing that. And so Adams is going to kill them by drowning them in beer or whatever he does. Like, it's just brutal war on rats and a take no prisoner style.

[Stephen Dubner]

When Sullivan talks about Eric Adams drowning rats in beer, he is referring to an idea that Adams promoted in 2019 when he was borough president of Brooklyn. This involved an Italian rat trap called an echo meal. It is baited with nuts or seeds, a Rat, upon entering, drops through a trap door into a vat filled with a green alcohol based solution. Say what you will about Eric Adams, as an elected official, he's got a lot of problems at the moment. And by the time you hear this, he may have been shoved out of office, but he could never be accused of flip flopping on rats. Shortly after he was elected mayor in 2022, he signed into law a rat action plan. It included four key components. Rat resistant trash containers, more timely trash pickups, the creation of rat mitigation zones, and a crackdown on rats around construction sites. Here's what one city council member said at the time. Today we declare that rats will no longer be the unofficial mascot of New York City. This rat action plan, of course, required a rat czar in the person of Kathy Karate. And she explained that a major focus of the plan is to cut down the rat's food supply.

[Kathy Karate]

What we're effectively doing is making their lives more stressful and cutting off their superpower to breed. There's a whole 99 page report about how we're going to do that because again, simple things are complex when we talk about the dead density of New York. For a long time, New York City before we were known for our black bags on the curb. We were known for our steel trash cans on the curb, as made famous by Oscar the Grouch.

[Bobby Corrigan]

Oh, I love trash.

[Kathy Karate]

So the can he sits in was ubiquitous to New York before the plastic bag.

[Stephen Dubner]

If you have never visited New York City, it may surprise you to learn that most trash is simply left out for pickup on the sidewalk in big plastic bags. As Karate says, trash used to be put in metal cans with lids. During a sanitation strike in 1968, those cans overflowed with tons of loose trash, and newly invented plastic bags came to the rescue. Plastic was also quieter and much lighter, which made the returning sanitation workers happy. There was just one problem. Rats had an easy time chewing through the plastic. So what's the new plan?

[Kathy Karate]

We're moving towards containers, which means basically a garbage can with a secure lid.

[Stephen Dubner]

These new containers are also made of plastic, but a much thicker grade than the flimsy bags.

[Kathy Karate]

And as of November this year, 2024, there'll be different administrative code and legislation in place that 70% of New York City waste will be back in containers.

[Stephen Dubner]

And here's the person who can tell us more about that.

[Jessica Tisch]

My name is Jessica Tisch. I am the New York City Sanitation commissioner.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's what Tish was when we spoke a few months ago. She has since become commissioner of the New York City police department. The previous one resigned in the midst of a federal investigation. The one before that resigned after clashing with the mayor. Like I said, the Adams administration has been a mess. In any case, when Jessica Tisch was running sanitation, she understood just how important that job is.

[Jessica Tisch]

Sanitation is the essential service in any city, but particularly in New York city. Every day we leave 44 million pounds of trash out on our curbs. And from my perspective as a lifelong New Yorker, New York City hasn't really changed the way we manage that trash in decades. For the past 50 years, we have been leaving our trash out on our curbs in black trash bags. It looks gross in the summer. It smells gross. One third of the material in those black bags is human food. And unfortunately, human food is also rat food. So we dump all this trash in our curbs and we sit around and we wonder why we have a rat problem. The single biggest swing that you can take at the rat problem in New York City is getting the trash bags off of the streets. And that is what we have set out to do. We don't want the bags on the streets. Instead, we want our trash in containers. Most cities around the world have been containerizing their trash for decades. New York City is not going to be the first city to do this. In fact, we are definitely going to be one of the last. This is long overdue and it works everywhere else.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, so let's get into the details. Smaller buildings and single family homes will have their own bins.

[Jessica Tisch]

We have developed, I would say, a gorgeous new standardized New York city official wheelie bin. A lot of people laugh at us because they think we sound like we have discovered the wheelie bin. We acknowledge that we have not. Nonetheless, we have a standardized wheelie bin now in New York City that all one to nine unit residential buildings will be required to use.

[Stephen Dubner]

And how about bigger buildings?

[Jessica Tisch]

You would need in those buildings too many of those wheelie bins. It would become unwieldy. So instead for those large buildings, we are going to put large fixed on street containers. These containers are about 4 cubic yards. The bins do take up parking spaces, but because they are being used just for the large buildings of 30 units or more, it's not as big a hit to parking citywide as you may otherwise expect. We estimate that it's about 3% citywide.

[Stephen Dubner]

These new large on street containers will also require new garbage trucks.

[Jessica Tisch]

Sanitation workers cannot lift these four cubic yard containers in the United States. We didn't have a large Automated side loading truck that worked in cities. And so we developed that truck with some vendors who do work in Europe. And we rolled out the first of these automated side loading trucks that are going to hoist these four cubic yard containers.

[Stephen Dubner]

If you've ever seen garbage trucks in Germany or Singapore or, well, a lot of places, the sight of a New York City garbage truck extending its claws to lift and dump a big trash can may not impress you, but here, it's a big deal. The program is currently being piloted in a few uptown neighborhoods, including Harlem. When someone posted a video of the truck in action on social media, the sanitation department retweeted the video with a message. This was our moon landing. Now, before we go making fun of New York City for what some people might consider an overstatement, let's consider this. Trash tech is one thing to get right. Trash behavior is another. Jessica Tisch realizes this change is hard.

[Jessica Tisch]

I think generally, having worked my whole career in city government, I see that it's a change that affects all 3.5 million residences in New York City, all 8.3 million New Yorkers, and all 200,000 businesses. Taking out your trash is something you do every day. So now by containerizing it, we're asking everyone in the city to change the way they do something.

[Stephen Dubner]

And that's not the only behavior change to worry about. Back on the street with Bobby Corrigan, we still haven't seen a rat. But on a nearby park bench, we do come across signs of recent human activity. A discarded wrapper from a raisin cake.

[Bobby Corrigan]

This is classic right here. Someone just came recently. They sat down to have their little snack. Human beings, I don't know what I've read is 20 to 25% of us as a species, we do that behavior. That 20, 25% is all the rats need. Probably it's triple what they need. The rats that live here will come out and say, well, how much was left in that wrapper? And the answer is enough for them tonight. We can't have this beautiful behavior, but we can't get away from it, no matter what postage you put up. Please don't litter. Please do your trash right. Human beings, some don't care. Leave me alone.

[Stephen Dubner]

Further down the street, we come across a bank of the new trash containers for big buildings. Corrigan is impressed.

[Bobby Corrigan]

So this is a very smart thing for a city to do, is what we see here with this new bank of containerization, that instead of leaving bags on a curb, they get put into a bank. The key thing is to make sure that if a car hits this or dents it or breaks it, that's going to be expensive, right? So everything's going to have its pluses and minuses.

[Stephen Dubner]

Actually, everything about New York's new trash plan is expensive. The new bins, the new trucks, the new vigilance.

[Bobby Corrigan]

Long term sustainability. This is going to save hundreds of millions of dollars for a city. This is the most environmentally smart thing you could do, the most humane thing you could do. If the rats want to move on to some other place, go for it.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's a nice thought, in theory at least, that New York City's rats will just move on to some other place if their food supply is constrained. But first, there needs to be evidence that the new containerization plan is actually working. The other day, walking down the street, I came across a few of the new wheelie bins that Jessica Tisch is so excited about. They were lying on their sides, the lids broken off the hinges. And if I were a rat, I would be excited. What do we have here? Shake shack, Luke's lobster? Maybe even per se. There have also been reports of rats chewing through these supposedly rat proof trash bins. In a recent interview, the president of New York's sanitation workers union said things that work throughout the country don't work in New York. New York is New York. It's its own thing. Now, given his position, he may be sending a message because the more you automate trash pickup, the fewer jobs there will be for sanitation workers. Coming up after the break, is a rat free city even possible?

[Ed Glaeser]

It's clearly possible that you can have an urban area without rats, but they do love it there.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. Before the break, we heard New York City rat czar Kathy Karate say that by the end of 2024, some 70% of the city's trash was no longer being placed in flimsy plastic bags, but rather in sturdy plastic bins.

[Kathy Karate]

The goal is 100%.

[Stephen Dubner]

What's the timeline for that?

[Kathy Karate]

We're waiting to kind of play out these pilots and see what the feedback is. What's the best technology that works? Rats do not care about jurisdiction. So we need to think about how we do this work as a whole of city approach.

[Stephen Dubner]

That whole of city approach will still include some poisons or treatments, as Karate calls them.

[Kathy Karate]

Some of our quote, more sexy treatments. Rat ice is one of them. That is dry ice. It off gases carbon dioxide and that asphyxiates the rats right in their burrows. We Also use a technology called Burrow Rx, similar idea. It off gases, carbon monoxide. The rats asphyxiate in their burrow. And a new technology that's come out in the last couple years is a canister of carbon dioxide. Same application. The difference with that is we can measure how much gas is flowing out of the tank. We can actually use that in closer proximity to buildings, which is really important in a dense city like New York.

[Stephen Dubner]

And how about the rat birth control we discussed earlier with Bobby Corrigan?

[Kathy Karate]

Most of the birth control contraceptive that's on the market for rats requires a constant feed, meaning they have to feed on it over and over again. And if we have food competition, that becomes a challenge.

[Stephen Dubner]

So the mayor who appointed you, Eric Adams, this administration is turning out, especially in recent weeks, as we speak, to be one of the most problematic, potentially corrupt administrations recently. All sorts of investigations, seizures of cell phones, the resignation of the police chief and so on. What's it like to be representing a city agency like you are now with all that storm going on around? I'm just curious from the personal perspective of how hard it makes your job.

[Kathy Karate]

You know, we have a job to do, and I come to work every day committed to doing that. The immense responsibility to do this well for the city that I love, for all the people who live in this city and feel such a heavy impact from that. That's the focus.

[Stephen Dubner]

I could also see that because of your job and because of how much people care about rats, I could imagine if you do this well, that you are mayoral material. Is that an ambition?

[Kathy Karate]

No, I'm just focusing on serving the public. I was out twice this week, once in Brooklyn, once in downtown Manhattan, walking with groups, talking about rats. I've held folks hands as they're tearing up about rats that are in their homes. And then on the other side, you know, folks who are inventing their own devices to keep rats out of their property. That's what I love. I love the city. I love our ingenuity, our human ingenuity, and our rat ingenuity. And that's what keeps me fired up about this work.

[Stephen Dubner]

So how are Karate and her colleagues performing in the early days of this war on rats? As she told us in part one, the science of rat measurement is not very sophisticated. There is no reliable rat headcount, so the metrics she uses are a bit removed. Rat complaints called into the city's 311 line, for instance, and rat sightings in the new mitigation zones, those numbers are down, but much more Data is needed and there is a potential countervailing force. A new research paper by a large team of biologists and pest control experts argues that climate change is contributing to the rise of the rat population in New York and other big cities. So maybe the rat will remain our unofficial mascot.

[Ed Glaeser]

It's clearly possible that you can have an urban area without rats, but they do love it there.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is the Harvard economist Ed Glaeser. We heard from him in part one of this series as well. He is an expert in and huge fan of cities, and he grew up in Manhattan. I asked Laser what he thinks of the city's rat action plan.

[Ed Glaeser]

Impacting the food supply seems sensible, though that requires New Yorkers to be very attentive about their trash, which is not something I remember all New Yorkers being, but perhaps that can be managed.

[Stephen Dubner]

I don't know how much time you've been spending in New York lately, but there has been a wholesale change, which is the conversion from plastic bags of trash that you just throw out onto the sidewalk and wait for sanitation to come pick up, which plainly doesn't seem very rat proof. In fact, it's not at all to a requirement that trash be contained in plastic bins with a top. It seems pretty darn sensible and indeed easy.

[Ed Glaeser]

I agree with that. That sounds perfectly reasonable. Although you're still depending upon the New Yorker actively, like shutting the plastic bin and keeping it effectively closed.

[Stephen Dubner]

Now, what about you, Ed? If you were rat czar, in addition to changing the way food is disposed of, what other solutions might you think about?

[Ed Glaeser]

Well, I would of course start with something like measurement. One article I saw is that Hong Kong seems to be doing a lot with heat vision things, so they're looking at the rats moving around at night. I imagine you could do that with some combination of drones and satellite in a way that would give you an effective idea of where the rat hotspots are.

[Stephen Dubner]

Why would measurement be important for you?

[Ed Glaeser]

Because I want to know whether whatever I'm doing is working. These things might be right, but without measurement, who knows? And I think you know in everything where there's a problem and you don't feel like you've seen a solution that's been tried 50 times and always works. The first thing is to start with the humility to learn. You know, let's try the trash cans and let's see if the rat density goes down sufficiently in this region. Presumably this should be compared with the traditional poisoning method.

[Stephen Dubner]

As far as we can tell, there's not really been any kind of decent rat census. Why do you think that is? Is it that hard?

[Ed Glaeser]

I think it's pretty hard because a lot of them are indoors. Even if you could have, you know, drones full time on every alleyway in the city at night, that's not going to give you a full measure. And you don't even know if, like, you're seeing a rat at 1am and a rat at 3am Are these the same rats or not? Are you actually going to know that?

[Stephen Dubner]

You know, there was one solution we didn't touch on. One potential solution which has been tried before, I believe in Egyptian cities in the old days used this, which is just armies of cats. You like that idea.

[Ed Glaeser]

So Sullivan claims that cats can't take down a fully grown rat, in which case you need terriers. Having enough terriers to take on. If you thought, let's say we were at 2 million rats in New York, that's a lot of terriers. And it's not like dogs don't potentially carry diseases as well. I'm always worried about introducing large numbers of some other species to get rid of one species. One thing we haven't talked about is the eating of rats. There's at least some tradition in parts of China for eating rats that strikes me as being an enormously sensible thing, somewhat similar to the East Asian practice of selling night soil. So both Chinese and Japanese cities engaged in the practice of basically selling their human excrement to farmers in nearby areas. And that created a very virtuous circle where the farmers had better land and the excrement got removed. Dealing with a problem by turning it into something that's desirable, like, you know, food that seems kind of good now, most of the time in the west, we haven't been able to stomach it, but that strikes me as a thing to potentially think about.

[Stephen Dubner]

Yeah, I read now the rats that are currently eaten in China are often. The bamboo rat says they're specifically bred for consumption. An estimated 66 million raised annually in China. You don't happen to know how a bamboo rat tastes versus a Norway rat, do you?

[Ed Glaeser]

I do not know. I have never eaten either kinds of rat. But I would happily eat a bamboo rat in Fujian if I were there.

[Stephen Dubner]

What about eating a Norway rat in New York? If prepared well.

[Ed Glaeser]

If prepared well, sure. I'm open. Is someone actually serving Norway rat?

[Stephen Dubner]

We did look around to see if anyone in New York is serving rat. We checked in with a restaurant where, for another episode, I once ate a bunch of insects which were delicious, but they had shut down. We could not find rat on a single restaurant menu in New York City. We also wrote to some private chefs. I figured they get unusual requests all the time, but no luck there either. Here's how one chef replied. Unfortunately, I am not able to source this for you. However, I would be happy to cook for you and your guests a beautifully constructed dinner using squab. We passed on that squab is too easy.

[Bobby Corrigan]

I have eaten rats, but I'm going to tell you that I cheated.

[Stephen Dubner]

That again is Bobby Corrigan, the urban rodentologist. We're still huddled with him outside in an alleyway.

[Bobby Corrigan]

And the way I cheated is I have a friend who works in a laboratory studying drugs and pharmaceuticals, and they use it on rats. So I just said, can you bring me a rat? So I ate a laboratory rat, but it's the same species, it's the same muscle, muscle tissue, it's the same everything. So technically, did I eat rat? Yes. Did I eat Norway rat? Yes. But did I eat wild nori rat off the streets that may have come out of a sewer? I would be very dumb to do that. It's full of internal worms, virus, you know, it's disgusting. I would not. You'd be dumb to do such a thing.

[Stephen Dubner]

Our next question for Corgan was. Well, you know the next question. Did his rat taste like chicken?

[Bobby Corrigan]

Yes. But here's the thing. All mammal muscle tissue, right?

[Stephen Dubner]

It's not that different standing in the cold with Corrigan. Today, we aren't hoping to eat rats. We're still just trying to spot one. So far on this tour, we have seen plenty of ARS active rodent signs, but no active rodents. Corrigan still has faith.

[Bobby Corrigan]

I would put it at about 50, 50 that we're going to see at least a couple of rats.

[Stephen Dubner]

We head over to a small park in Tribeca.

[Bobby Corrigan]

Rats love parks because the Norway rat is actually from Mongolia. And in Mongolia, their life was to burrow into the soil of the fields of Mongolia. So their brain says, get into the earth.

[Kaylee Byers]

Right?

[Bobby Corrigan]

Geotropic positive. Get towards the earth. Squirrels are geotropic negative. Climb trees away from the earth. So it's a situation where parks, if the soil is healthy, which it has to be for a park, to keep the plants growing, the rats get down, they'll dig a hole. You'll see a hole. Probably we'll find one here shortly.

[Stephen Dubner]

We do find a hole, and then another, then four more. Six burrow holes in one small area of one small park.

[Bobby Corrigan]

Rodents are really great examples of. Work hard and you'll be successful, right? So these animals, they're constantly digging in soil, constantly constructing burrows, constantly seeking food. You know, they get it done. And so when people say it's so hard to get rid of rats, it's like, that's right, because you're up against a hard working, intelligent small rodent that we don't appreciate enough. I'm constantly thinking, you know, we could actually do things like rats a little bit more, as crazy as it sounds, and our species, Homo sapiens, would be better for it.

[Stephen Dubner]

It's late afternoon by now, starting to get dark, and we give up without having spotted a rat. Does this mean New York City's rat problem is getting better? Maybe. But maybe not. The Norway rat is primarily nocturnal.

[Bobby Corrigan]

When this city goes quiet, that's rat time. It's like when they're inside buildings and they're in the walls, how do they time their time to come out when the plumbing stops? So when people get ready for bed and they brush their teeth and they use the showers and then all of that stops in the building, that's their time. When it starts up again in the morning, it's back to bed.

[Stephen Dubner]

It does make you wonder just how much of our war on rats is a war against some part of ourselves.

[Bobby Corrigan]

Animal behaviorist will say, you know, when we do study rat colonies, we're studying ourselves. It's very true. When you put rats under stress, they get aggressive. We get aggressive under stress. What causes people to be happy, be sad, be anxious. All of those things play out in the rats as well.

[Stephen Dubner]

So should we be leaning into our shared experience? Coming up next time, in the third and final episode of Sympathy for the Rat, we will hear about rats as pets.

[Jessica Tisch]

If you want to love them, you have to know about them.

[Stephen Dubner]

Rats as research subjects.

[Kathy Karate]

In my experience, rats are better for.

[Stephen Dubner]

Self administration of drugs and rats as movie stars.

[Jessica Tisch]

Can I just say, ratatouille is an.

[Ed Glaeser]

Idea as a story.

[Jessica Tisch]

It's an allegory.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. [e-mail] where we publish transcripts and show notes. This series is being produced by Zach Lipinski with help from Dalvin Abu Aji. We had recording help this week from Nev Jan and Digital Island Studio. The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarz, Morgan Levy, Neal Carruth, Sarah Lilly and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

[Jessica Tisch]

I haven't read the Freud Ratman stuff. I put it off all these years because, you know, I can only take so much therapy. And frankly, therapists can only take so much of me.

[Robert Sullivan]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side of Everything.

[Jessica Tisch]

Stitcher.