I very much appreciated Aaron Timms’s piece on New York City’s War on Rats. I have dreamed of a day when we could live in this city as part of a “rat detente,” where the temperature of the conflict is lowered, but the conflict itself remains unresolved. And especially in light of the recent primary results, and the probable mayoral election of a candidate that seeks to act on many of the corollary parts of New York’s issues with rats (substandard housing, nasty absent landlords, a food waste stream that is, in itself, filled with a wild amount of waste), there is a golden opportunity for New York City to embrace the peaceable coexistence with our rat friends while still denying them the means to expand their population ever further.
But how do we engage in a conflict without resorting to both the language of war or, as I’ve maybe oddly fumbled on above, the language of ethnic cleansing?
By embracing the language of diplomacy. We must leave the militaristic idea of a “rat czar” or “war on rats” behind and instead coalesce around ideas and titles like “rat ambassador…