Rat’s Amore

I’M A REGULAR GUY, a New Yorker born and bred. If I get up early and beat the traffic I can put in a good five-to-six-hour shift at work, then make it back in time to feed the kids and relax before bed. Maybe—if the room is warm and the mood is right—I’ll enjoy an intimate moment or two in the marital cocoon. Work hard and you’ll get ahead, my parents always told me. But now? None of that seems possible. We all knew things would be bad under the new administration, but none of us expected them to be quite this calamitous. Our right to food, water, shelter is under attack, our very existence as a species in peril. Lethal dangers lurk around every corner, and the government’s goons have swarmed the city. What awaits us when we venture outside is deportation, sterilization, evisceration, extermination. Do they hate us because we’re different? Because we’ve committed the sin of being unlike them? We’re no better than dirt to these people. Well, let me rephrase: We’re no better than dogs. Dirt has given me some of the happiest moments of my life. Dirt is wonderful. Dogs? You might say I’m not a fan.

Life was already precarious enough before the regime change: the grind of the daily commute, the shitty working conditions, the constant hustle to feed the family, the poison that’s seeped into our diets (RIP Flaco). The survival of the fittest, fuck-you-got-mine Darwinism of it all. And that’s before we even get to gentrification: For years the plague of upzoning has made us refugees in our own land, and we’ve had to watch—with only the occasional squeak of protest—as our homes have been dug up, kicked in, filled with concrete, and turned into residential towers for assholes or new dorms for NYU or mixed use retail megadevelopments anchored by Targets and Best Buys and Burlington Coat Factories that never seem to have any customers in them.

Even in our marginalized new reality we can’t know peace. Uprooted by the urban eugenicists’ schemes for beautification, we live under conditions of near-constant insecurity, fearful of the next boot through the door, resigned to the developer’s axe. Harassed, hunted, assailed at every turn by the two-headed predator of capitalism and the state, we have never been granted the privilege of an easy life. Skittishness has become our default mode of existence, the quick dash into the shadows our trustiest reflex. And people wonder why we gnaw. Now, improbably, disastrously, things are even worse. For years we used to melodramatically complain that New York had become unlivable. Now it actually is. Eric Adams’s fascists are in the streets, and America’s death cult is coming for us. Containerization, waste reform, integrated pest management: This is the language of our collective slide into authoritarianism. Not a day goes by without some fresh tragedy, news of another disappearance. Since the start of the troubles, the violence has claimed friends, loved ones, neighbors, colleagues, even enemies. I, like many others, have faced the strangling pain of burying a child. Most demoralizingly of all, the so-called “progressives” of the human left are onboard with this program of elimination, mocking us with their “Scabby” inflatables at union protests and their cover art in architectural reviews. Talk about a kick in the rapidly growing teeth!

The harder survival becomes and the less possible the conditions of a dignified life appear, the more I have come to understand that these people will not rest until we are all gone. What kind of an existence is this? Those of us in the middle months of adulthood grew up frolicking, feasting, and fucking in alleys, parks, trash bags, tree pits, toilet bowls, drop ceilings, and subway stations. We emerged into the world with our sense of life’s possibilities unshackled: We were the rats; we would inherit the earth. Our kids will know none of this boundless, carefree confidence. The only reality they’ll experience is the dread of constant displacement, chronic hunger, and sexlessness; the trauma of all-out war. And for those of us who survive, what do we have to look forward to? The future seems grim, whichever direction it takes us in. Our enemies seem determined to push us out of New York City altogether. And I’ll be honest with you: If it’s a choice between death and New Jersey, I’ll take death any day of the week. —Mason Imrat

OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS, whenever I’ve told people I’m working on a piece about the rats of New York, I’ve received a volley of advice on how to describe the city’s varmints-in-chief and our relationship with them. “Make sure you mention how cute they are!” one friend urged; another called them “our furry buddies,” as if they were upholstered Tamagotchis. The brown rats common to New York are, of course, entirely dependent on humans and the waste we produce for survival; their presence among us is a sign of prosperity and excess, of civilization even. They are our followers, our mirror species, our effluvial offspring: Where go humans, so go rats. Above and below the ground we lead parallel lives, and with each passing year it’s becoming harder to say who has the better side of the bargain. But the affection for the rodent enemy evident in these reactions took me by surprise. Do we want what they have: the freedom to eat and play and mate with dancing abandon before the sweet release of an early death? Do we envy the rats for their enjoyment of a life unburdened by having to know what Grok AI is? Or are we simply jealous that some form of life, even if it’s not human, has found a way to live in New York rent-free?

I was raised in a subtropical city filled with giant flying cockroaches and virtually no rats. The cockroach has always struck me as a familiar, harmless presence, while the rat seemed vile, a herald of pestilence and disease, a Lovecraftian offense against the natural order. However accustomed I’d become to the nibbling rhythms of the New York street and its discrete markers of rodent cohabitation—the droppings, the burrow openings, the mad scatter of the rats five paces ahead on a sidewalk after dusk— nothing about the many years I had spent living here had convinced me to revise my position. But then, last fall, it happened: I began to see the rat as a fully formed being with dreams and enthusiasms and sorrows. Crossing under the overhead tracks of the M train near my apartment in Ridgewood, I passed a tiny lame rodent, its hind legs limp and shattered, enduring what appeared to be its final awful moments on earth. I stopped and looked down. The baby rat looked straight at me, its black eyes somehow softening under the afternoon sun. “Pity me,” it seemed to be pleading. I kept walking. The vision of those mournful dying eyes has stayed with me ever since.

In the world of urban rodentology, identification precedes elimination: To eradicate the rats one must first know them, perhaps even feel for them. The best meditation on the art of pest control I’ve ever encountered is the 1986 Polish documentary The Rat Catcher. The film chronicles a campaign waged by a single, unnamed exterminator to clear an abattoir in rural Poland of its rat infestation. Dressed in an ensemble of white overalls, a check shirt, thick rubber boots, and a flat brown cap, his expression inscrutable behind thick sunglasses and the black cloud of a chinstrap beard, the rat catcher takes just a few days to complete his mission, methodically progressing from the first walk-through, when rats burst like water from cracks and holes in the slaughterhouse walls, to the final, grisly confrontation with the king of the pack. Empathy is the soul of his method: He understands that the rats are intelligent and will only accept the poison with which he plans to exterminate them if he is a credible source of food. So he works, over many days, to gain their trust, touring the plant with a bucket from which he doles out great ladles of non-baited grain. After a while the rats have learned to trust him so much that they come to him the moment he approaches; on the day that he ultimately adds poison to the food supply, even as the first victims stagger and die around him, the rats continue swarming to his feet in search of nourishment. “A complete trust,” he announces in a chainsaw baritone as the camera pans over a feeding frenzy unfolding next to a carpet of rodent corpses. “It will not occur to them that I could have deceived them—betrayed them. This way I destroy around 80 to 90 percent of the population. After that all is left are the leaders. And this is the hardest part.” Though poison is now seen, in the enlightened echelons of the pest control industry, as a tool of last resort, elements of the Polish rat assassin’s strategy—in particular, the careful attention paid to its targets’ behavior—survive in the modern approach to urban rodent mitigation.

At the time of its release, The Rat Catcher was widely seen as a political allegory for Poland under martial law. The temptation of interpretation is always powerful wherever rats appear in culture. In a way that distinguishes it from other rodents (no one ever made an allegory about a chinchilla), the rat—in literature, film, politics, art—has to signify something larger than itself. Sometimes a figure of horror and sometimes a symbol of hope, throughout cultural history the rat has stood, variously, for the chaos that makes humans susceptible to tricksters and demagogues (“The Pied Piper of Hamelin”); for the terrors of totalitarianism (rat torture is the ultimate punishment in 1984’s Room 101) and family history (Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”); for the necessity of ingenuity (Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”), resilience (Camus’s The Plague), and grit (Ratatouille) in a cruel and unforgiving world. How, then, are we to interpret the initiative led by Eric Adams, currently shielded from federal corruption charges by Trump’s Department of Justice, to finally get New York’s rat problem under control? In a way it illustrates the smallness and absurdity of policy in a world where government long ago ceased to be the leading actor, offering the perfect metaphor for the end of state capacity: A mayor who’s motivated purely by greed and self-interest and will do anything to save his own skin has launched a campaign to eradicate a class of animals motivated purely by greed and selfinterest that will do anything to save their own skin. Can city hall self-exterminate? Will Rattus maior defeat Rattus norvegicus? Signaling both his unseriousness of purpose and the city’s entry into an era of purely performative politics, Adams has spurned the obvious solution to getting rid of the city’s rats—offering them all free travel on the first Turkish Airlines flight out of JFK—and devised a strategy built around a radical and untested pest control method: merch. In November, I graduated as part of the inaugural class of the NYC Rat Pack, the mayor’s newest PR initiative in the campaign to defeat our ever-adaptable antagonists. I now have a graduation certificate, a Rat Pack–themed baseball cap decorated with the silhouette of a rat face, and a similarly branded T-shirt that’s a size too small for me (“Sorry, we’re already out of the Large”) to attest to my new credentials. The rats on my block don’t seem to care.

THERE IS, OF COURSE, nothing new about the spectacle of a New York City mayor getting tough on rodents. A ratopolis constantly at war with itself, New York has been waging Armageddon against the rats for almost as long as it’s had them. In 1946 Mayor William O’Dwyer appointed a city rat specialist, declaring, “Something should be done,” and since then various city leaders have taken that strangely wimpy recommendation—to do something, anything, about the rats—to heart, organizing task forces and action groups and community campaigns and inspection blitzes in a doomed attempt to repel the furry menace. Rudy Giuliani threw money at the problem, doubling funding for rodent eradication after enduring frequent encounters with rats on the porch of Gracie Mansion. Michael Bloomberg approached the challenge in customary technocratic style, viewing its resolution as a matter of data collection and messaging. The forerunner of the rat information portal that provides updates on the rat inspection history of each block throughout the city dates from his administration, as do the “Feed a pigeon, breed a rat” posters that still adorn many civic structures. (Judging by the intractability of the issue, it seems many New Yorkers interpreted this slogan as a command rather than a warning.) Bill de Blasio—whose first term coincided with the emergence of Pizza Rat, a cultural figure of such enduring consequence that the “Shouts and Murmurs” published about it remains the oldest story filed under the “meme” tag on The New Yorker’s website—announced a $32 million rat reduction plan in 2017, with cooperation across the agencies responsible for sanitation, transportation, parks, buildings, and public housing. None of it worked.

On fait la guerre quand on veut, on la termine quand on peut: New York’s leaders could have ended the war on rats generations ago, once the futility of the struggle and the inevitability of human defeat became clear. But this is the perfect forever war, a conflict whose prospects of success are as low as the electoral costs of repeated failure. Now the campaign continues under the auspices of a mayor who has himself, as a landlord, been repeatedly cited for rat infestations at the Bed-Stuy brownstone he owns. Adams has presented two of his pet rat initiatives—the appointment of a “rat czar,” former Department of Education sanitation specialist Kathleen Corradi, and the convening of a national urban rat summit— as heroic firsts. In fact, he swiped both ideas from the Giuliani administration, which tried them out for the first time more than two decades ago. In recent times the city has—in a bid to avoid secondary poisonings of wildlife like Flaco, the Eurasian eagleowl that took up residence in Central Park after escaping from his zoo enclosure but died nine months later after ingesting rat bait and colliding with a building—launched a pilot program to deploy rat birth control, and some council districts have embraced carbon monoxide as a way of gassing the rats in their nests. But such measures are the exception rather than the rule, and traps, rodenticides, and other miracle cures are generally now out of fashion. Instead, Adams’s rat eradication strategy, building on the work of his predecessors, attempts to attack the invasion at its root: The goal is to coordinate action across various city agencies to change the environment that allows rats to thrive, denying them access to food, water, and harborage. The ecological thinking behind this approach is known as “integrated pest management,” and among its founding credos is the idea that the “war on rats” (a military metaphor that the mayor himself has enthusiastically adopted) is above all a war on trash, without which the critters would never survive— hence Adams’s push for containerization of garbage and an end to the decades-long practice of setting out refuse for collection in great banks of plastic bags. Starve the rats of sustenance and deny them a place to live, the logic goes, and their numbers will eventually dwindle. There are now antirat community days of action and four rat mitigation zones—in the Bronx on either side of the Grand Concourse, in Harlem, on the Bed-Stuy/Bushwick border, and around the Lower East Side and Chinatown—set up around the city. Adams and his czar have been swift to trumpet their victories (sightings down 45 percent in the rat mitigation zones!) while casually explaining away the embarrassments. Overall rodent complaints to 311 have jumped more than 7 percent since Adams took office, Corradi said recently, because more New Yorkers are now “actively engaged in reporting” rat sightings.

If Adams’s rat plan differs from those of his predecessors, it’s in the effort to engage the public. On a Monday night last November, I returned to the very corner where I encountered the dying baby rodent to follow a “rat walk” led by Corradi around the perimeter of Rosemary’s Playground, a block-sized slab of concrete dotted with shrubbery and recreational equipment. Corradi is a task force of one: She has no staff, and as I discovered in the course of my research for this piece, she also responds personally to almost every email sent to the city about rats. The tone of these emails is upbeat, brisk, helpful, efficient, much like Corradi’s public persona. After I sent her a follow-up question about the history of trash disposal in New York, she pointed me in the direction of Picking Up, anthropologist Robin Nagle’s excellent 2013 study of the city’s sanitation department, adding: “It was great to meet and there’s never too many questions! Thanks for taking part in our collective efforts!” (This was not at all what I expected after learning that Corradi booted NYRA’s Catty Corner columnist from the national rat summit, though a slight chill descended on our email correspondence once I informed her I was a writer working on a piece about the city’s plans for murine annihilation.)

The group assembled for this lesson in civic ecology was a strange mix of landlords, community board regulars, hobby exterminators (“I see one!” exclaimed a guy wearing a headlamp shortly after our tour began, pointing manically at a ripple of movement in the shadows), professional loiterers like me, and neo-hipsters who thought the whole thing was so funny and were there mostly so they could joke about participating in a rat walk at the local honky-tonk night. With the passion of a preacher and the patience of a teacher, Corradi guided us through the anatomy of the infestation scene, pointing out burrow entrances, raisin-shaped droppings, and the light carpets of leaves and sticks with which rats like to conceal their homes’ emergency exits. What had appeared to me, for many years, to be a drab outdoor funzone by the elevated subway tracks suddenly presented itself as a thriving rodent community. Two sets of family attachments were being formed in this space—by humans on the slides and climbing nets above the ground, and by rats in the tunnels dug under the flower beds. Of particular interest to Corradi were this small park’s plentiful sources of rat sustenance: standing water, streaks of rich bin juice oozing from randomly dumped garbage bags, some fortifyingly carby discarded crusts of pizza and a scattering of chicken wings with meat still plump on the bone, the inviting red pool of a salsa container left open on a bench. “Food, water, shelter,” Corradi explained. “Everything rats need to survive is here, and the challenge for all of us is to disrupt this triangle of life.” The invincibility of the urban rat is tied, at the most fundamental level, to humans’ prodigious capacity to produce waste. The rats spread leptospirosis and hantavirus (the disease that recently killed Gene Hackman’s wife), chew out car wires, and ravage our homes—and in return, we deliver them a nightly feast of leachates and putrescibles.

Each household in New York, I learned a week or so later at a two-hour “rat academy” seminar run by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, produces 8.4 pounds of food waste every week—enough to feed nineteen rats. Attendance at a rat walk and the rat academy are the two main requirements to become a certified member of the NYC Rat Pack, the Adams administration’s new program in civic rodent education. (The final requirement is a day of community service, though this is so loosely defined as to include anything that involves not being an asshole in public: One classmate I befriended later told me the community service he nominated on his Rat Pack application form was “throwing my litter in the nearest trash can.”) Adams has presented the rat academy as another great innovation, but as with other elements of this latest offensive in the war on rats, the idea has been repackaged from previous regimes; the Bloomberg administration launched a threeday “rodent control academy” for property owners and pest control pros back in 2005. Adams’s slimmed-down seminar offers a quick education in the ways of the enemy: the rat’s ferocious reproductive capacity (a male can ejaculate multiple times in a row, and a female can produce a total of eightyfour offspring in one year); its poor eyesight and reliance on vibrissae to get its bearings (hence a preference for runways parallel to solid objects and the avoidance of open ground); its ability to chew through anything softer than steel; its appetite for dog shit. Above all the seminar stresses the synergy between human and rat. “Rats are a lot like us—their priorities are food, housing, family, and a short commute,” the instructor informed me and ten other aspiring Rat Packers on the day I attended. Rats are neophobic, thigmophilic, and geographically unadventurous: They set up shop wherever conditions are conducive to burrowing (earth is ideal, but concrete will do), walls and clutter allow for easy navigation, and food and water are abundant. Rarely will they stray more than sixty-five feet from their nests. Enclosure and warmth are also essential to the rat’s sense of well-being. There’s a kind of rodent hygge governing the design of the burrows, which means that covering or filling their entrances with rocks, say, is actually a boon to domestic rat arrangements rather than a hindrance.

The point of the Rat Pack is to spread awareness about rats and the scale of the effort needed to contain them. “Anything that has people talking about the topic is good,” Corradi explained on my rat walk. “My official title is ‘citywide director of rodent mitigation,’ and there’s this misconception that I can control everything. But I can’t. It takes all of us.” Now a proud member of this civilian platoon of amateur rodentologists, I obtained my Bachelor of Rat, as I like to call it, in a ceremony that Corradi led on the steps of city hall. Wherever I go, I will now carry the distinction of being a credentialed expert on rats—and I will have an arsenal of moderately interesting facts about rats, the ability to spot the telltale sebum trails that roving rodents leave along the ground, and the ill-fitting merch to prove it. Go team! For a government chronically short on funds, enlisting residents in the war on rats seems like a smart move. But the rats will not be factoided into oblivion; simply arming residents with a handful of basic stats about rodent biology and some funny hats is not, of course, enough to decontaminate the city. What seems like public education and engagement is probably, on closer inspection, a plan to implicate ordinary New Yorkers in the governing class’s chronic failure to rid the city of vermin: The problem is not them but us, the feckless and irresponsible citizenry with none of the selfdiscipline needed to starve the rodent foe into submission.

IF TRASH IS THE REAL CHALLENGE of rat mitigation, containerization seems like a decisive step in the right direction. But the early evidence shows patchy uptake of the fifty-gallon bins that are now supposedly mandatory for single-family homes and smaller buildings with up to nine units, and the plastic bag remains a ubiquitous colonizer of sidewalks. Given the bewildering collage of methods and responsibilities for waste disposal in the city (the Department of Sanitation handles residences and schools, while businesses have to contract with private carting companies), there’s also a very real question of how effective a handful of poorly maintained—and by no means rat-proof— plastic bins can be in making a meaningful dent in the rodent food supply. Even in the “improved” environment of city-mandated containerization, trash disposal is still essentially an exercise in laying out the rats’ nightly dining table. Refuse spews from the orifices of many garbage containers throughout New York, including those with sealable lids, and the ongoing messiness of the whole process highlights a dearth of imagination and courage in city hall.

A place like New York, which has neither the alleys nor the courtyards that other dense cities rely on as critical arteries of waste disposal, essentially has two choices when it comes to managing the dregs of consumption: an individual solution, which resembles the present hellscape of mobile bins, bags, and streetside accumulations of random crap; or a collective solution, with big common trash containers set either above or below the ground. New York has 76 million feet of curb space, much of it occupied by three million on-street parking spaces. The pandemic showed that not all of this acreage needs to be given over to cars, that more creative uses of public space are possible. A recent Department of Sanitation study concluded that a citywide shared container program would account for no more than a 10 percent reduction in parking on residential streets citywide. A pilot program for stationary curbside bins is set to go into effect in an uptown Manhattan community board district this summer, but rarely does anything come from such schemes, and the likelihood of other districts adopting a similar approach seems low given the mayor’s priorities. Under Adams, the car is sacrosanct— the idea of claiming even a small amount of curb space for the virtuous work of creating a cleaner city is beyond the pale— and containerization is mostly a publicity exercise, a policy with the appearance of decisive action and none of its substance. What feels like a major step forward is actually a green light for the car and the rat to keep running the city’s curbs. Not for nothing, perhaps, have the automobiles on our streets, from the Prius to the Tesla and on to the new generation of urban tanks, increasingly come to resemble their rodent partners. Far from succumbing to our never-ending tide of cutesy anthropomorphizations (these furry little guys are just like us!), the rats are starting to fully shape the material world in their own image: The hideous spectacle of the Tesla Cybertruck wide-bodying down one-way streets with the well-fed entitlement of a rat prince is now every bit as common throughout this city as the fetal bulge of a violated black trash bag on a hot summer night.

Bungled waste management reform is especially disappointing in the current environment, since Adams seems like the perfect man to take the war on rats nuclear. The campaign fits his patrol cop’s distaste for the perceived scum of the city, and rats, happiest in soil or sewers, are nothing if not the ultimate lowlifes. Adams, who at the time of writing still faces the possibility of a reindictment after the mayoral race, has repeatedly emphasized how much he “hates rats,” and the feeling is probably mutual: Perhaps his rat haters will become his rat waiters should he sit down at the table of success in jail. The zeal with which he has set about the rodential combatants’ obliteration recalls his parallel campaigns to purge New York of migrants, disappear the homeless, deny street vendors a livelihood, and rid the subway of those too poor to afford the $2.90 fare: Under Adams’s mayoralty, the city is being made hostile to any being, human or otherwise, deemed a threat to public order. But this is where the analogies between human and animal contaminants end, because rats—unlike the poor, the unhoused, or the undocumented—will never be pushed out of New York.

Superficially, integrated pest management offers an enticingly holistic view of the road map to a rat-free city, but the integrations it recommends—between agencies and residents and businesses all pulling together to cut rodent nutrition off at the source—aren’t nearly comprehensive enough to match the scale of the problem. Earlier I said that waste in New York requires curbside pickup in individual or collective bins. That’s not entirely true: Fifty years ago Roosevelt Island, which Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed to be mostly carless, introduced a pneumatic sanitation system offering a radically different alternative to the hard labor of manual set-out and collection. The system, still functional to this day, retrieves household garbage from more than 14,000 residents and sucks it through turbine-powered tubes at a speed of 70 miles per hour before depositing it in a central processing plant. The tubes are sealed, which means they’re effectively rat-free. This Pompidou Center of New York City trash would be virtually impossible to build today. The whole scheme is so futuristic, so invested with the spirit of high modernism (a spirit it shares with the island’s housing complexes, in particular those designed by Josep Luís Sert), that it seems irrecuperably retro. But its enduring success highlights a tension that’s often missed in all the bloviation about the war on rats. Trash turns New York into a vermin banquet, but the decrepit condition of the city’s infrastructure is an equally important, if overlooked, part of the hospitality we extend to the muroid nemesis. Crack city is rat city: All those busted pavements, rusting overpasses, potholed streets, rotting façades, and lagoonal subway stations offer sanctuary to the rodents below, allowing them to harbor, swim, multiply, and thrive. Meanwhile, archaic and ludicrous building regulations conceal the city’s building exteriors in more than four hundred miles of plywood scaffolding, providing further cover for pests to proliferate. Roosevelt Island’s delightful trash tubes belong to an era when funds for public construction were far more abundant than they are today, and the state—operating through powerful agencies like the erstwhile Urban Development Corporation—had either the self-confidence to go it alone on big works or the dexterity to forge productive partnerships with private capital. Fast-forward to the present and New York has now entered a terminal phase in which it is simply accepted, even as the residential towers of Manhattan stage a race to the heavens, that public infrastructure is irretrievably shitty, a lost cause. With a few meager exceptions, disinvestment is now the law of the land.

The more I examine this contrast between private munificence and public poverty, the easier I find it to see our rodent adversaries as an essential structural support to the two-track city, to capital’s horror of the commons and our culture’s desertion of the stout old concept of collective wealth. Eventually, I can picture the supertalls themselves held up by a phalanx of rats—and what is 111 West 57th Street, the tapering 1,428-foot ectomorph planted at the foot of Central Park, if not a squashed rat pointed skyward? Neither the money nor the political will to revamp public assets and rat-proof the city exists in New York today—and there’s certainly no help on the way from Albany or Washington. Corradi is skilled at her job, but the job is impossible. The notion of integrated pest management seems laughably incomplete in a crumbling city run by a flayed state—and this is before we even get to the effects of climate change, which is producing milder winters propitious to rat procreation and now raises the specter of what Pest Management Professional Hall of Famer Bobby Corrigan calls “exponential growth” in the local rat population over the coming years. Indeed, academic research suggests that global warming is already having this effect, not only in New York but in major cities around the world. Adams can push trash set-out times back to 8:00 p.m., hand out a rat-branded cap to every New Yorker, and containerize to his tiny heart’s content; rule by wheelie bin will do nothing to eradicate the rats in a city that’s falling apart on a planet that’s boiling to death.

THE ONGOING FUTILITY of the campaign to eliminate them raises an important question: Do we even want to live without rats? The only place on earth that is rat-free is Canada’s province of Alberta—and if there’s one thing New York can be counted on never to do, it’s go Canadian. What is New York, after all, without its filth, without the bread rolls and vegetable rinds and severed prawn heads and rat-frenched drumettes that adorn its sidewalks? All those orphaned falafels, splattered zitis, heave-ho’d beef ho funs, and halal cart combos that didn’t make it attest to New York’s status as the world’s Trashlantis. This steaming heap of a metropolis treasures its dross even as it’s half-heartedly binning it. No place has produced more culturally influential garbage; from the detritus of this city have come punk rock, New Hollywood, the notion of “downtown grit,” New York’s own abiding status as “fun hell,” and 90 percent of the material for David Letterman’s opening monologues on the CBS Late Show. Garbage is not only essential to the iconography of the city, it’s the very foundation of our streets: 20 percent of greater New York was built on fill, much of which was created from rubbish, and the city’s early history is the tale of a constant battle to clear the dung heaps, oceans of horse urine, and dead dogs that choked Manhattan. Could it be that the war on rats is not really about the eradication of feculence but its glorification? Eric Adams’s most telling adventure in the rat trenches dates not from his mayoralty but from his stint as Brooklyn borough president, when he assembled the media to demonstrate the power of a new trap he’d had installed around Borough Hall to address a growing rodent infestation. The cooler-sized lure, disguised to look like an extension of the borough’s regular garbage containers, killed the rats by drowning them in a soup of alcohol mixed with water. To the shock and dismay of the gathered reporters (“Are you kidding me?” “What is this?” etc.), Adams’s assistant removed the boozy tomb from its enclosure and spooned the dozen or so dead wet rats inside into a plastic bag for disposal. The whole spectacle, with Adams beaming nearby, was so grotesque and inhumane that it seemed motivated more by a desire to display the rat carcasses than announce any new advance in pest control.

Rats, of course, are the animal externalization of the consumption economy, and in New York their supremacy still reads as an index of the city’s extravagance, its special gift for unproductive expenditure and loss—a fecundity that flourishes even amid public austerity, since it obeys the higher calling of capitalism. Over the past century or so consumption has come to be seen as something relatively benign, an exercise tantamount to eating food. But the earliest English uses of the word equated it to waste, dominion, or destruction—a sense that lingers in the idea of being consumed by flames or rage. Perhaps, in their unintentional but insistent way, our rodent companions reconnect us to this etymology. A city ruled by rats has the aspect of a modern potlatch, demonstrating the vastness of its wealth and power via the assemblage—and, thanks to the rats, mobilization—of its own stunning surplus. In the same way that the first Calvinists felt that melancholia, a longing for death, and even a delight in the horrors and grief conjured up by the thought of life’s end signified godliness and divine election, modern consumers have developed a sentimental attachment to the abomination of their own refuse. The enjoyment we derive from consumption is now linked to the exhibition of its by-product—an attachment that global warming, the late-modern retread of the old Puritan infatuation with death, has only intensified. Hedonism is at its most exquisite before the apocalypse. Fatbergs, landfills, rat infestations, incinerated forests, and sinking cities are all part of the same pageant: Flirtation with self-annihilation, and even glee at its unfolding performance, is now critical to our culture’s vitality, its sense of heroism and stakes. Progress, accumulation, wisdom depend on our indulgence of this appetite for destruction. We paraglide while the forests of the Columbia River Gorge burn and sunbathe on the smoke-strangled beaches of Rhodes. In New York, garbage has become romanticized. Rats matter because they take us closer to the brink.

A city that’s happy in the muck, in love with the spectacle of its own waste, can never be truly serious about eradicating its vermin. We extend the war on rats not in the hope of victory but expecting our inevitable surrender before the murine tide. In this, as in other areas, New York leads the way. Look around: There are Sieg Heilers in the West Wing; Elon Musk is on stage at CPAC gloating, “I am become meme;” the official White House account on X now posts ASMR comedy about deportation flights; and measles is something to spread rather than prevent. Brain worms and cry-laugh emojis rule in every direction. The country is selfimmolating amid an orgy of profiteering, immiseration, cruelty, and despair; America’s glory is being made complete through degradation. The rats aren’t living in our world. We’re living in theirs.