New York City is looking for a new director of rodent mitigation to tackle a task that many previous mayors have taken on without success.
The rat has lived in New York since the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), or thereabouts. And for at least a century city authorities have tried to eradicate it, but have failed.
Thus, on Wednesday (30), centuries after the rattus norvegicus was first loaded onto a ship bound for New York, the city tried again, announcing the newly created position of “director of rodent mitigation”.
The unusually humorous job posting, first reported by Gothamist news site, is looking for someone equipped with a college degree, five to eight years of experience and, “most importantly, the drive, determination and killer instinct needed to fight back. against the real enemy — New York City’s relentless rat population”.
He suggests that the ideal candidate must possess “endurance and ingenuity” to defeat the rat army, described as “cunning, voracious and prolific”. The job will pay from US$120,000 to US$170,000 a year (R$650,000 to R$920,000).
Mayor Eric Adams certainly has a lot on his plate: record levels of homelessness; a budget teetering on the edge; persistent crime rates. But there are few more consistent lines from the mayor’s public career than his fixation on rats.
Adams, who said he owned a rat as a pet growing up, linked his fixation to the “trauma” rats inflicted on New York families. In the first 11 months of his administration, he made no fewer than six announcements that were pitched, at least in part, as anti-racist efforts.
In perhaps his most famous act in his previous job as Brooklyn Borough Chief, he organized a demonstration of a modern mousetrap that involved pulling drowned rats out of a tank.
Some sanitation experts worry that Adams’ focus on rats will distract from more pressing needs, such as the city’s commitment to virtually eliminate residential waste by 2030.
But Adams’s anti-rat mission is in line with his larger goal of ending clutter and making New Yorkers feel safe. He reinstituted anti-crime units that, in their previous iteration, were prone to violence. And on Tuesday, before traveling to the World Cup in Qatar, via an anti-Semitic conference in Greece, he announced an initiative to more aggressively institutionalize some mentally ill homeless people against their will.
The rat initiative was treated a little less seriously.
“Despite its successful public engagement strategy and sassy social media presence, rats are not our friends — they are enemies that must be defeated by the combined forces of our city government,” read the job posting, written by a city ​​hall speechwriter. “Rodents spread disease, damage homes and wiring, and even try to control the movements of kitchen workers in an attempt to take over human jobs.”
When the New York Times sent the post to Juan Ignacio Sanguinetti-Scheck, a postdoctoral fellow in organic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University who has studied the behavior of mice, he asked if the Times was “mocking” him.
“No way is this real,” the scholar said via email.
But is.
The New York City Department of Health already has a rodent biologist, Robert Corrigan, a renowned scholar of urban rodents, who is busy installing motion sensors on city streets to monitor the animals’ behavior. The Department of Health also has a Pest Control Office. There’s an anti-rodent task force all over the city.
But what existing efforts lack, according to Meera Joshi, the city’s deputy mayor for operations, is a leader to coordinate them.
“The idea is that an experienced and skilled leader can get the most efficiency out of the different assets we have,” said Joshi, who will be the head of the new rat czar. “I think anyone who’s met our mayor knows it’s clearly a top priority for him.”
Jason Munshi-South, a professor of biological sciences at Fordham University who has worked on urban rat issues, described the new position as “potentially a good idea” but said actually dealing with rats would mean changing the way New York City York treats your garbage.
“The biggest problem is the way we deal with garbage in this city, which is basically bags of food thrown out on the street every night,” Munshi-South said. “What we know doesn’t work is just poisoning them, drowning them, those kinds of things that come up.”
Benjamin Miller, author of “Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York, the Last 200 Years” and director of policy at the Design Center for Zero Waste, agrees.
“Our current collection system is ideal for mice,” Miller said via email. “In the past, New York required by law to use metal trash cans to keep out rats.”
Voles are an invasive species. But, argued Sanguinetti-Scheck, so are we. Like us, they can transmit diseases, in their case salmonella and leptospirosis. The latter, in rare cases, can cause death.
They are also social, intelligent and playful.
“It’s no joke managing a living population of animals in a city,” said Sanguinetti-Scheck. “Obviously, rats exist because humans exist, and they kind of live together in the same urban jungle.”
A self-described “rat advocate,” Sanguinetti-Scheck finds it puzzling that humans are comfortable with other rodents, such as squirrels, which can also carry disease, but not with rats.
“Some people think it has to do with the bare tail of mice versus the fluffy tails of some other rodents,” he said.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
