Boomtown rats

To combat its rat problem, New York City is using traps, rodent-killing college and a furry 'Kate Moss', writes Marion McKeone

Every New Yorker, regardless of income or social standing, is the proud possessor of two things: a celebrity sighting and a rat sighting. Both are among the city's great levellers; no matter how wealthy you are or how poor, sooner or later you'll spot one or other scuttling past.

Every New Yorker has a shaggy rat story. Doormen guarding the palatial homes on Fifth Avenue swear that twice a year - once at the start of summer and once at the onset of winter - you can see a shuddering grey sea of fur and twitching tails scuttling from its multi-million dollar homes into Central Park. They say uptown rats take up summer residence until the weather cools. Then at dusk one autumn evening, they return en masse to their nests in the walls and basements of the rich and famous.

Then there is the cab driver who tells you about the time a rat and a passenger simultaneously leaped into his cab during a downpour. The passenger won - the rat wasn't carrying a fare - but it was a pyrrhic victory; the human passenger ended up switching destinations from a fancy downtown restaurant to her shrink's midtown office.

Come the summer months, as the city's rich and infamous head for the Hamptons, the ratio becomes distinctly skewed. And this summer, two things have conspired to ensure a burgeoning rat population. One is the unprecedented level of construction as the city's building boom continues to escalate. The other is the climate - one of the mildest winters in New York history has provided optimal breeding conditions for rodents.

Gil Bloom is president of New York State Pest Management Association and director of the Queensborough Community College's faculty of pest control. He also runs one of New York's biggest pest-control corporations. According to Bloom, unprecedented activity in the construction industry has disrupted New York's complex rodent societies, stressing its members and causing them to scatter in search of food, shelter and water - often into apartment blocks, workplaces and restaurants.

ESTIMATES OF THE number of New York rats vary. The old rule of thumb was one for every human inhabitant - somewhere between eight and 12 million. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene doesn't disagree with these estimates but its spokeswoman, Sara Markt, says the precise number is impossible to quantify.

Professional exterminators, such as Charles Kourbage, the owner of Kingsway Exterminators in Brooklyn, says the number has long since scurried past the 60 million mark. "Look, there's no need to worry about numbers. There are plenty of rats for everyone." Bloom agrees that the rodent problem in New York is worse than he has seen in his 30 years in extermination.

His assessment is borne out by the statistics, which show that the number of sightings and infestations reported to the city authorities has exploded; so much so that the city has increased its rodent-control budget from $8 (€5.8 million) to $13 million (€9.4 million). And it has set up the rather grandly titled Rodent Control Academy to help combat the problem.

Back in 2005, the academy was intended as a one-off event - a sort of three-day rat camp for the city's rodent inspectors, exterminators and sanitation workers. But as the rodent control problem has grown exponentially, so too has the academy. Now it is a permanent institution, complete with certificates and matching hats and tote bags for students who successfully complete its intensive rodent-control courses. So far more than 300 budding city exterminators have graduated, ready to wrestle with this most persistent of pests.

Last month, the city's health department advertised for a full time co-ordinator, "an opening for enthusiastic self-achiever who wants to ensure that every inspector is adequately trained on how to recognise signs of rodent harbourage and/or infestation and how to utilise integrated pest management techniques to eradicate rodent infestations".

A college degree and some experience in pummelling rats to death is required and, according to Markt, there has been enormous interest from people hoping to become New York's first Dean of Rat Extermination.

The Rodent Control Academy's success is in no small way due to the fact that it managed to secure the services of Dr Bobby Corrigan - an internationally renowned rodentologist and the "superstar of the rodent-control industry", as Robert Sullivan dubbed him in his best-selling book Rats - to design and teach the course. There is nothing Corrigan doesn't know about his subject.

Corrigan's curriculum is not for the faint-hearted. His lectures on how to properly bait, trap and poison rodents in ways that don't just drive an infestation down the block are accompanied by a slide-show that prompts shrieks and shudders from his class. More than once, a student has bolted for the door and not returned. Course materials include spiral-bound copies of the curriculum divided into chapters such as "Using Exterior Bait Boxes for Rat Control: What, When, and How" and a large rubber rat, which allows the students to familiarise themselves with their quarry's physiognomy.

According to last year's Census Bureau figures, 28.7 per cent of rental units and 7.6 per cent of owner-occupied housing had rats. This doesn't take into account infestations in restaurants and feeding centres for the city's poor and homeless, both of which have been the source of well-publicised horror stories. And city officials concede that, despite their best efforts, the number of complaints and the rate of infestations are soaring - already 40 per cent higher than last year.

"There's no question that we have a rat problem . . . the city has put out traps and poison at record rates," Mayor Michael Bloomberg has conceded.

The Bureau of Pest Control Services has expanded its staff of inspectors, known as sanitarians, exterminators and lot cleaners.

The problem has proven a boon for private extermination corporations. But Bloom and Kourbage both claim the regulations placed by the city on the sort of poisons pest control companies can use and where they can use them has hampered attempts to keep the problem at what he describes as "an acceptable level".

Extermination companies routinely use glue and snap-traps but the toxic anti-coagulant Talon-G is the most commonly used method of extermination. "We'd use it a lot more and a lot more effectively but for city regulations that are really aimed at private individuals," Bloom says.

Complicating the problems, rats develop resistance to many of the poisons and obtaining regulatory approval to use newer products is slow and cumbersome.

Past attempts to deal with the problem included the use of Epiblock, a bait containing rodent contraceptive. Given that two rats equals 300 new rats a year and the population increases exponentially at a rate of more than 100,000 per cent a year, investing in a chemical that would sterilise rats would seem to be the most effective option. But its use was discontinued; it was too expensive and its results too unpredictable.

Bloomberg says city exterminators kill more than 100,000 rats a year, which barely makes a dent in their number, so a preventative approach is the only answer.

GIVEN THE RESOURCES that were put into combating, for example, the West Nile Virus, the $13 million (€12.3m) allocated by the city to deal with its rodent infestation seems like a paltry sum. But while they can spread disease and thousands of incidents of rat bites are reported each year, New York's breed is typically the brown rat that burrows underground and is unearthed when buildings are demolished. They don't carry rabies or Weil's disease or communicable diseases, so while they are a dirty, unpleasant nuisance, the health risks associated with the problem are regarded as relatively low, a spokesman the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene says.

According to the city authorities and the private contractors, the most effective way to stop rats from breeding is to stress them - to deprive them of food, water and shelter. "New Yorkers have created this problem and we can solve it only by changing the way we dispose of garbage and food," Bloom says.

One part of the new effort involves collecting information on computers, block by block and building by building, in the most rat-infested areas of the city. It's loosely modelled on the crime-fighting initiative dreamed up by then mayor Rudy Giuliani, which tackled the crime problem using grids that pinpointed the worst affected areas.

Another element is a public education campaign with colourful posters and slogans such as "Feed a Pigeon, Breed a Rat". But the campaign, which included subway posters depicting larger-than-life rats at eye level with standing passengers, attracted complaints for their graphic and distressing nature.

Jeffrey Escoffier, director of the health, media and marketing group at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, was surprised, given the department's approach to the campaign. "There are not that many stock photos of rats," Escoffier said. So, "we actually had a photo shoot with the rat. We took a lot of pictures. We made sure the rat had the right look and pose." But even the Kate Moss of the rodent world proved so unsettling to squeamish subway passengers that the posters were removed.

In addition, every Tuesday, representatives of 22 agencies - including the buildings, health, parks and sanitation departments, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Housing Authority - gather in Lower Manhattan to discuss who should handle rat sightings in places such as sewer drains, alleys and playgrounds.

The preventive approach, known among specialists as "integrated pest management", has gradually become the city health department's official policy, particularly because of increasing safety concerns about poisons and the resistance rats are beginning to show to them. But it is still in its infancy and whether initiatives such as the Rodent Control Academy will deliver results remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Bloom has some simple advice to New Yorkers; keep your food covered, put your leftovers in rodent-proof bins, and seal cracks or holes in walls. A fully grown rat only needs a half inch gap to wriggle through. And most importantly, he says, unless you want to be bitten, don't try to kill a rat with a broom. Use a shovel instead.