Amid New York City’s ongoing war on rodents, Dateline’s Calliste Weitenberg went on a night hunt with anti-rat vigilantes. Via DatelineSBS
In the six months I’d been living in New York, I grew accustomed to the city’s whiskered menace. Like noise, concrete and steel,I, too, started documenting my own rat interactions, sharing videos of a rat walking up the stairs to my friend’s apartment, or eating dinner next to me on a subway platform. The quirkier, more outrageous the behaviour, the better the bragging rights.Meet an eclectic group of terrier-obsessed dog lovers called The Ryders Alley Trencher-Fed Society, also known as RATS.
Once there, equipped with a keen sense of smell and lightning speed, it takes less than ten minutes for the dogs to start accumulating kills. In one evening spent trailing the RATS team in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I witnessed the dogs wipe out 35 rats in less than two hours. They would have caught more, Richard explained, if the temperature hadn’t dropped to -10C.
In 2017, the City’s previous Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a US$32 million assault on the most problematic rat strongholds with a plan that included a new extermination method of stuffing dry ice into rat holes.Leaving even a few rats behind can mean disaster. Their accelerated reproductive cycle means that over the course of one year, just two rats can balloon to a staggering 15,000.Dale paid almost $30,000 to freeze his dead dog.
Richard Reynolds, leader of the Ryders Alley Trencher-Fed Society that huts rats with specially trained dogs on the streets of New York City.In NYC, rubbish is left on the sidewalks in plastic bags until a garbage truck comes and hauls it away, which can sometimes take days. For a rat, the time in between is a veritable feast.
In a perfect example of the city’s administrative dysfunction, more than 1,500 illegal dumping sites, perfect breeding sites for rats, were identified across the city by the Department of Sanitation. The solution was easy: clean them up.
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