In 1839, the naturalist John Jay Audobon was granted permission by Mayor Isaac Varian to begin shooting rats he spotted along the Battery. In the 1960s, following a series of nest-shaking tenement demolitions, the Daily News trained teenagers to lay rat poison. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani hired future subway boss Joe Lhota as his โRat Czar,โ while Mayor Bill de Blasio has toyed with removing trash cans to stamp out the unwanted rodents. David Lynch was even involved at one point. Still, there are rats.
On Thursday, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams joined the pantheon of New Yorkers operating under the notion that the rats might be eradicated, if only we tried a new approach. In one of the more gut-churning press conferences in recent memory, Adams summoned the cityโs reporters to Borough Hall to demonstrate a โcutting-edgeโ rat-killing deviceโpart bait trap, part drowning tankโknown as the Ekomille. We were promised dead rats, and goddamn did we get them.
Click here to read the full post at Gothamist. [CONTENT WARNING: SO MANY DEAD RATS]