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Poison traps. Birth control. Carbon ice. And now, what city officials tout as a high-tech solution: drowning.
New York has attempted to eradicate its population of rats that have been swarming for 355 years and more. On Thursday, Eric Adams, Brooklyn's district president, unveiled with great pomp the latest tactics of the Sisyphean effort.
It was actually a bucket that would attract rodents and send them dive to death in a mysterious mix of vinegar. The poisonous potion, according to its manufacturer, Rat Trap Inc., prevents them from rotting too quickly and emitting a stink.
A dozen journalists were gathered around Mr. Adams when he happily posted a plastic bin containing rat blobs floating in a mouse gray stew; it was a dread show and the smell was stunning.
"Sometimes you need to see for yourself to get the shock effect," Adams said.
"Are you serious?" Said one of the reporters present, while another turned his face. "It's disgusting."
Adams said he wants to install the new traps, which cost between $ 300 and $ 400, in several locations in Brooklyn. If successful, he indicated that he would seek to develop the methodology throughout the city.
The pilot program has already encountered a problem. Adams' office originally had five boxes in and around Brooklyn Borough Hall, but one of them was disabled by a very big rat. "It was so big that it broke the spring mechanism in the box and prevented it from working," said Jonah Allon, spokesman for Mr. Adams.
Although the New York "rat war" is as old as the city itself, the methods are constantly changing.
In 1865, an angry New York Times reporter wrote that "the pitfalls are of no use, "and that the solution would be" to engage a piper pie to ravage the vermin until its destruction. "
There was an attempt at birth control on rats, first tested in 2011 and then deployed by the Ministry of Health as a pilot program in 2017; it is still used in some parts of the city.
Next, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority conducted in 2013 a test of a "fertility management bait" in the subways, worth $ 1 million, and stated in 2017 that it would be extended to new stations after "promising results". Although the plan slowed down breeding somewhat, it had no quantifiable effect.
In 2017, the administration of Blasio proposed a $ 32 million plan, part of which was to kill rats by stuffing their burrows with dry ice, a method approved by E.P.A. (In a park in Chinatown, filling burrows with dry ice caused the death of 1,200 rats – suffocated by the release of carbon dioxide – and a reduction of 60 to 2 burrows for rats, officials said. )
This plan is usually effective, said Jason Munshi-South, professor of biology at Fordham University, who studied rats in New York. But it takes a lot of work and energy; Someone has to stuff the dry ice in thousands of burrows and then monitor the nests.
In unveiling his new rat trap, Adams – who staged a so-called Rat Summit last year – launched a tirade against Mr. de Blasio's plan for 2017, which included garbage with the scent of mint that repelled the rats. accounts, do not seem to work. He showed a video of rodents crawling in one of the bags.
"None of these have remarkable results," said Professor Munshi-South, who said he saw rats feeding on Mint-X bags. "The daily experience of urban dwellers is that rats are a problem and their condition is getting worse."
Professor Munshi-South described Mr. Adams' solution as an "assault tank at a carnival where the rat falls and drowns". He added, however, "It is beneficial not to spill poison."
But He said that this would eventually prove pointless until New York resolves underlying issues such as the proper waste label. Even if 90% of the city's rats were killed, survivors could potentially reproduce faster due to reduced competition for food, he said.
"You may be harvesting rats like cereals," he said.
Adams said residents of the city were largely responsible for reducing the rat population in New York.
"New Yorkers need to understand that they have a role to play in ending it," he said. "I do not think we have built an appropriate culture on how to dispose of our waste. People have not made the connection between what your neighbors do with their garbage and how it feeds the problem. "
A press release relating to the event indicated that Mr. Adams "Show 90 rats captured during the new pilot program", but there was only about 20 in the new trap.
Rat sightings reported in the city's 311 hotline increased 38 percent from 12,617 in 2014 to 17,353, according to an analysis of city data by OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit watch group, and The Times. During the same period, the number of times that city health inspections revealed active signs of rats nearly doubled.
As the rats in New York have grown in number and sizethe same goes for pest control.
"It's disgusting, but it's helping people," Peter Golia, who heads Distribution of rat trapshe said, holding a bag of rat carcasses in the air. "If you put a dead rat in the trash with poison, it breaks down in the ground and contaminates the soil."
Yet he was shy about the trap recipe that eliminates rodents, calling it a "natural solution."
"It's a solution based on alcohol, oil and vinegar," he says vaguely, adding, "It's organic!"
"You could actually drink that and you probably would not die," he said. "Well, maybe a little sick."
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