The mayor of New York, Eric Adams, completed in a few days one of those journeys that go from the glory of heaven to the underworld, call it hell if you will.
Adams, who is Christian but not Catholic, was received at the Vatican last weekend by Pope Francis. The fact that the Supreme Pontiff gave him the blessing, which will have comforted his spirit, does not mean that, upon returning to the Big Apple, it is already clear that it has not made him be more pious towards his worst enemies: rats.
Contrary to the Bible, he does not consider them other creatures of the Lord, but rather a stamp of Satan. The “damned rodents”, so cute in cartoons, are the representation of hell for this former police officer turned politician.
“New Yorkers may not know this about me, but I hate rats and I am sure that most residents of this city think the same,” the mayor said in the statement where he made an unprecedented announcement to date.
Back from Rome he pulled an ace out of his sleeve in his war against the Murids. New York, always a point of reference, will hold the first “national summit” on urban rats on September 18 and 19. Better said, against these mammals that, despite their terrible poster, act as New Yorkers. You just have to take a night walk down any street in the metropolis to watch them running from a garbage bag to a sewer drain.
There are those who add humor to the matter and use irony to equate this quote with “the Yalta conference” (Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill negotiating the end of the Second World War), although applied to the conflict with these beings, an expression of globalization. long before globalization, which provoke social rejection. You are on a terrace, suddenly you hear an agg! and there is the little animal, pulling the bag of chips (and it is not an exaggeration).
“The best way to defeat the enemy is to know the enemy,” Adams added to justify the call. “We are going to hold this inaugural summit so that experts and leaders in the field come from all over the country and thus, together, we better understand urban rats and how to manage their population,” he said.
Academic researchers or municipal pest managers are invited, who will share sessions dedicated to rodent mitigation tasks and the advancement of science on the treatment of urban rats. There will be experts from cities such as Boston, New Orleans or Seattle.
In April 2023, Adams appointed Kathleen Corradi as the director or czar of the office of rodent mitigation, a position she debuted. This more aggressive tactic has borne some fruit, with sightings dropping 13% in the last year.
There is no shortage of critical voices. Michael Parsons, an urban ecologist at Fordham University, warned a few months ago that “several mayors have declared war on rats and there have been few obvious benefits.”
Jakob Shaw, project manager at the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, stressed after the summit announcement that Adams’ violent rhetoric about rats is very worrying. “It doesn’t help anyone or anything. We must respect these animals and work with intention and care to address the problem. “There is no need for this call to conclude that leaving millions of kilos of garbage on the streets of New York is a constant source of food for rats,” he told Gothamist.
The City Council is trying to ensure that waste bags are on the sidewalks for fewer hours, while containers are deployed to ensure that an increasingly greater amount of the more than 20 million kilos of remains generated daily in the city are put away.
And the specialists warn that we must go to the origin. Two rats can give birth to 15,000 offspring. Therein lies the strength of what Adams calls “public enemy number one.”
