New York City’s mayor calls them “public enemy number one.” History books say they caused the Black Death — although recent scientific evidence disputes that claim. So is the rat a scapegoat? And what does our rat hatred say about us? (Part one of a three-part series.) SOURCES:Bethany Brookshire, author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains.Kathy Corradi, director of rodent mitigation for New York City.Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University.Nils Stenseth, professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Oslo. RESOURCES:"On Patrol With the Rat Czar," by Mark Chiusano (Intelligencer, 2024)."How Rats Took Over North America," by Allison Parshall (Scientific American, 2024)."Where Are the Rats in New York City," by Matt Yan (New York Times, 2024)."Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains" by Bethany Brookshire (2023)."Human ectoparasites and the spread of plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic," by Nils Stenseth, Katharine Dean, Fabienne Krauer, Lars Walløe, Ole Christian Lingjærde, Barbara Bramanti, and Boris Schmid (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018). EXTRAS:"Freakonomics Radio Live: 'Jesus Could Have Been a Pigeon.'" by Freakonomics Radio (2018).
Chapter 1: What are the milestones for Freakonomics Radio?
Hey there, Steven Dubner. This year will mark a pair of anniversaries for us. And even though I ignore most anniversaries, these two have got their hooks in me. It has been 20 years since Steve Levitt and I published Freakonomics. And it's been 15 years since I started Freakonomics Radio. So we are thinking about making some kind of anniversary episode.
And I want to know if you have anything to share. Maybe it's a story about how you were influenced or inspired by something from Freakonomics. Maybe it's some kind of memory or coincidence that you'd like to tell us about. Whatever it is, send us an email or a voice memo, whichever you prefer. Our address is radio at Freakonomics.com. Thanks in advance for that.
And as always, thanks for listening. In the fall of 2022, a new job listing was posted on a New York City government website. The ideal candidate, the listing read, is highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty, determined to look at all solutions from various angles, including data collection, technology innovation and wholesale slaughter.
And what kind of government job requires wholesale slaughter? Here is the man responsible for this listing.
Rats do something to traumatize you, and I hate rats. That is Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City.
If you walk down the block and a rat runs across your foot, you never forget it. Every time you walk down that block, you relive that.
As you may have heard, Adams was indicted last year on five federal criminal charges, including bribery and wire fraud. Although in a remarkable departure from legal precedent, the Trump administration Justice Department just ordered those charges dismissed. Through it all, the mayor's anti-rat fervor has been undiminished.
Fighting crime, fighting inequality, fighting rats. Public enemy number one, many of you don't know, are rats. If you're not scared of rats, you are really my hero.
And that job that was posted on NYC.gov, that was Eric Adams searching for his hero, who turned out to be this person.
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Chapter 2: Why is New York City hiring a Rat Czar?
Rats have been exploiting New York City's urban space for at least a few hundred years. The ancestors of today's rats are thought to have arrived in the 18th century on ships from Europe. But in the historical rat timeline, that is still relatively recent. Genetically, they date back to the time of dinosaurs.
Today, there are two main species, the black rat, Radus radus, which likely originated in India. And then the brown rat that we are familiar with, Rattus norvegicus, the Norway rat, even though it did not originate in Norway. So why is it called that?
Because everybody who hates rats wants to name them after somebody they don't like.
That is Bethany Brookshire.
So basically the name stuck because somebody was picking a fight with Norway at the time.
Brookshire is a science journalist with a PhD in physiology and pharmacology. She recently published a book called Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains. So you can see where her allegiance lies. Here is some more rat history.
Europe was very black rat dominated until we think the 17th or 18th centuries when we began to see the brown rat. That is native to what we think of as Mongolia. Rattus norvegicus ended up getting spread into Europe. And then with colonialism, it just went everywhere else because rats and boats go together real good.
Interestingly, people have not liked rats, but they didn't necessarily consider them disgusting until about the 18th or 19th century. People didn't like them because they were a problem of the food supply, right? They would get in and they would eat your food and nobody wants that.
But they weren't considered to be disgusting in terms of they weren't considered to carry disease for a very long time. The association of rats with disease is a relatively recent one.
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Chapter 3: Who is Kathy Corradi and what is her role?
To the animals that we call pests, what are humans? Are we just pests that text and build parking lots?
That's actually something I got a lot when I was writing the book is it's humans. Humans are the real pests. We're the ones invading the world and taking it over and making it awful. I think that's too easy because it's the sort of thing that makes you fling up your hands and be like, oh, there's nothing I can do.
We have choices in the way that we treat other animals and we have choices in the way we treat each other. And we don't need to live the way that we always have.
So I think it is certainly true that the innate human reaction to rats, I don't know why, is largely revulsion. That, again, is the economist Ed Glazer. Certainly when you see them in an urban context surrounded by trash, right? So you associate the rats with the filth, with drinking the water and the subway, right? It's hard not to think of that as being sort of awful.
Since rats are no longer a big disease vector, at least for now in most places, do you think our frightened view of them is simply outdated and that for the most part, rats are, yes, a negative externality of humans in cities, but a really minor one that we shouldn't worry so much about?
I think it's probably pretty small. That being said, I would still probably be in favor of policies that keep the rat population manageable. In the sense that who knows what happens if you let it get incredibly vast, who knows what new diseases occur or what spreads across things. So I think some control, but not making a fetish out of complete eradication.
So, Ed, let's play a quick game of word association. When I say rats, you say what? Cuddly. Come on now, you're just trying to make me happy now, aren't you?
You know, it's hard not to think that rats have gotten something of a bad rap. They certainly are not healthy to have in vast numbers around you. But, you know, it's a very urban species and I tend to like that. They sort of co-live with humans. They're, in some sense, our natural city partner.
I want to run past you at a couple of titles we're considering for the series. Let me know what you think. One is The Exoneration of the Rat. Too much?
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