New York City officials are ramping up efforts to teach regular New Yorkers how to make their streets, businesses and gardens less hospitable to rodents, NPR reports.
The city has launched its "rat reservoir pilot" — an initiative to try to reduce the rat population in neighborhoods with chronic infestations. Part of the plan is to hire extra pest management professionals and to seal up holes in sidewalks, parks and other public infrastructure. Rats can squeeze through the tiniest opening "in doors, in windows, in sidewalk curbs, in any building infrastructure," says Caroline Bragdon, a rat expert with the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. "Rats only need a hole or a gap the size of a quarter to enter."
It's not enough just to poison the rats and collapse their burrows, Bragdon says. The city still does that, too. But she says the rats often come back — unless you can remove the conditions that attracted them in the first place.
The article noted that another part of the city's new initiative is to educate regular New Yorkers on the finer points of rat behavior. It's a class known as the Rat Academy, a free, two-hour course on how to make a business, apartment building or community garden less attractive to rodents. The city holds Rat Academies periodically for landlords and anyone else who asks.
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Source: NPR