Even with a new rat czar, an arsenal of poisons, and a fleet of new garbage trucks, it won’t be easy — because, at root, the enemy is us. (Part two of a three-part series, “Sympathy for the Rat.”) SOURCES:Kathy Corradi, director of rodent mitigation for New York City.Robert Corrigan, urban rodentologist and pest consultant for New York City.Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University.Robert Sullivan, author of Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitant.Jessica Tisch, New York City police commissioner. RESOURCES:"Increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to climate warming, urbanization, and human population," by Jonathan Richardson, Elizabeth McCoy, Nicholas Parlavecchio, Ryan Szykowny, Eli Beech-Brown, Jan Buijs, Jacqueline Buckley, Robert Corrigan, Federico Costa, Ray Delaney, Rachel Denny, Leah Helms, Wade Lee, Maureen Murray, Claudia Riegel, Fabio Souza, John Ulrich, Adena Why, and Yasushi Kiyokawa (Science Advances, 2025)."The Next Frontier in New York's War on Rats: Birth Control," by Emma Fitzsimmons (New York Times, 2024)."The Absurd Problem of New York City Trash," by Emily Badger and Larry Buchanan (New York Times, 2024)."Mourning Flaco, the Owl Who Escaped," by Naaman Zhou (The New Yorker, 2024).Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, by Robert Sullivan (2005). EXTRAS:"The Downside of Disgust," by Freakonomics Radio (2021)
Full Episode
Sometimes we go to war with our neighbors, and sometimes those neighbors are rats.
Okay, so we're outside in New York City looking at what we call active rodent signs, or ARS.
That is Bobby Corrigan. He is an urban rodentologist, a former rodent researcher who now works for the city of New York.
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.
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.
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.
And where did these burrowing rats come from?
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.
So you've got rats in the sewers, rats burrowing under the sidewalks. What else can we see?
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