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Gothamist | Is This Revolting Dead Rat Soup The Future Of NYC Pest Control?

Warning: for the queasy among us โ€” proceed with caution. This gets mighty real.

Originally published By Jake Offenhartz @ Gothamist.com

Sept. 5, 2019 4:58 p.m.

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Wow

David 'Dee' Delgado

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 โ€œRat 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 cityโ€™s reporters to Borough Hall to demonstrate a โ€œcutting-edgeโ€ rat-killing deviceโ€”part bait trap, part drowning tankโ€”known 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]