Eric Adams Promised Us Hope Through Boozy Rat Death Traps

NEW YORK CITY — Reporters summoned by Eric Adams watched in horror as a soggy rat corpse was ladled out of a plastic bin filled with booze.

The year was 2019 and the then-borough president wanted to show off a “cutting-edge” form of rat-killing technology that had killed 109 rodents at Brooklyn Borough Hall: a bucket with a trap door filled with an alcohol-based solution that can hold up to 90 dead rats.

In case anyone is dying for some more visuals pic.twitter.com/pDuApx5sxw
— Anna Quinn (@A_MQuinn1) September 5, 2019

"We had a rat infestation," Adams said. "But you don't see that any longer because of the month that we had this rat trap here."

Adams promised Brooklynites he was going to battle rats in the borough, and if the project proved successful, he'd take his project to City Hall.

Three years later, Adams is the mayor of New York City. So what happened to the boozy rat death traps?

A Boozy Rat Death Trap Pilot

The predictable outcry from animal rights activists wasn't loud enough to stop Adams from launching a pilot program to see what the $400 devices — which he insisted were not the same old bucket traps — could do.

In 2020, a handful of Brooklyn neighborhoods that included Flatbush and Prospect Heights were selected for the six-month pilot program. The Parks Department also tried out the buckets a cost of nearly $9,000.

The Flatbush Junction Business Improvement District sponsored the program and reported killing about 100 rats.

The Parks department declined to move forward with the wet rat bucket strategy after finding similar results.

Two buildings in Prospect Heights went all in.

Aaron, a longtime landlord in Prospect Heights who didn’t want his full name used, owns the two buildings where the pilot took place.

Tenants were constantly complaining about rats — a problem not isolated to his properties. The particular block had long been the scene of a community-wide effort to uproot a “rat reservoir” (read: lots of rats).

Before the pilot began, Aaron did everything right: he upgraded the trash receptacles to hardened containers at his two buildings, hired exterminators to come twice a month and filled gaps when found in the building. Still, it wasn’t enough to fight the formidable furry fiend.

So Aaron tried the Borough President's buckets and they seemed to make a difference. But the operators of the traps, Rat Trap Distribution Inc, told Aaron it would take longer than the span of the pilot program to see real results.

There was just one problem.

“As soon as they got their 30 seconds with the cameras … they stopped paying for it," Aaron said. “It was really a publicity stunt on Adam's part."

Boozy Rat Death Trap Results

Aaron refused to back down from the rat fight: he continued to lease the buckets on his own, and soon, both residents and the super began commenting on seeing fewer rats.

Since then, he’s leased out even more buckets for another property in Prospect Park South.

“Complaints from tenants have dropped drastically. The complaints from the city have dropped drastically. And both of our supers give positive feedback about it,” Aaron said, “so it seems like it's working.”

Carol Morrison, a social worker and longtime community leader in the Prospect Heights rat crusade, said that she’s glad the buckets have been deployed, but the rats still rule the block.

“The problem remains,” she said. “It takes a village to solve a problem of this magnitude.”

Aaron agrees. “It's really hard to control without the city helping,” he said.

While Aaron said he’s gone above and beyond to keep his trash rat-proof, if the owner next door isn’t doing their part keeping his building clean and trash secured, he can still get a Department of Health fine if there are signs of rodent activity.

He thinks the city is “deflecting” responsibility for fighting the rats.

“They're literally charging the landlord to help fix the problem that they're responsible for,” Aaron said.

The Mayor’s office was unable to produce a long-promised report on the pilot program’s results from then-BP Adams’ office and instructed the intrepid rat reporter to contact the current Brooklyn BP, Antonio Reynoso.

His office has yet to produce the report, if it exists.

Even without the official post-mortem on the pilot, rat experts say that this extermination-based approach alone, even aided by these clever Italian-made buckets, will never net true results.

Why? Because years of evolutionary progress has given the rats a major biological advantage: they’re way too good at making love.

Rat Love

Matt Frye, an expert at New York State Integrated Pest Management program at Cornell University, deals with all sorts of critter issues — large and small.

“I'm an entomologist by training,” Frye said. “Insects are really cool, but rodents are cooler.”

He does research and helps educate people on rat biology, which he says is essential to understanding how to operate an effective mitigation program.

Rats present a unique challenge because of their uniquely short gestational period. While humans typically experience 40 weeks of pregnancy, rats wait about 20-25 days, birth 5-12 babies, and are ready to conceive again two days later.

Rats typically have six litters per year and their progenies reach sexual maturity after a short nine weeks.

According to experts quoted in a National Geographic article, a litter of nine baby rats could grow, in ideal conditions, to nearly 12,000 a year later.

“You can eliminate any percentage of rats,” Frye said, “and there’s still a sufficient number to rebound.”

As evidence, Fry points to a study in Salvador, Brazil, that found rodents soon rebounded after a massive rodenticide program that killed tons and tons of rats.

Genetic testing revealed that the new generation of rats came from a relatively small gene pool, which means that a handful of rats likely lived the fantasy of being the last couple on earth tasked with the solemn duty of repopulation.

And the rats actually did it.

What's more disturbing, killing huge swaths of rats can actually produce a positive-feedback loop. With less competition for food, Frye says, reproduction can occur even faster.

As the adage goes: you just can’t kill your way out of a rat problem.

So, if boozy rat death traps are no match for the reproductive power of the rodent, how does New York City get its rats under control?

Let's go back to 1970.

Famous Rats Of History

New York City may have been grittier, but it was comparatively rodent-free, state data show.

While a 2014 study found New York City has one of the largest rat populations in the U.S., only 11.2% of New York City was considered rat-infested in 1970, according to a 1974 Health department paper.

What's more, New York was among the least ratty metropoles in the state, with block-by-block surveys finding higher rat densities in smaller and reputedly cleaner cites such as Rochester and Niagara Falls, both of which had rat rates in the 30s, the study found.

But 1970 was also the year New York experienced a major shift in trash collection, canning noisy and cumbersome Oscar-the-Grouch-style metal bins in exchange for lighter and quieter plastic bags.

The change was spurred by the 1968 sanitation workers strike, which both this excellent podcast about rats and this deep-dive story on trash note was a galvanizing event in the history of New York City rats.

The bags had some positives. For sanitation workers, this meant no more heavy cans, and residents slept easier without the sounds of cans crashing on the concrete at night.

But the biggest gain was for the rats: for the bags provided them free, reliable, continual access to food.

The result— a rat-boom so massive that rodents who partake of Hennessy, garbage and of course, pizza, became beloved New York celebrities.

This year, New York City saw rat sightings spike to up to 7,400 in the first three months of 2022 and, according to Frye, the Big Apple is going to keep losing to Big Rat without some major changes.

“Unless there's changes in how refuse is put out overnight, and how refuse is constantly available for rats," said Fry, "there's going to be a rat problem.”

Post-Pandemic Pest Problems

Trash is the key to solving rat infestations on a municipal scale, experts say. Control the food source, control the rats.

No matter how many buckets Aaron leases — or even how well-kept his buildings are — if his neighbors aren’t also securing their trash and the city still insists on leaving plastic bags overnight on the curb for collection, there’s no way to truly fight the rats.

Many sanitation efforts to reduce curbside rat buffets — new litter basket designs, containerization, residential composting pickups and increased trash pickups — were cut or put on hold at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But as mayor, Adams has made some moves away from a death-first policy, attacking the problem “upstream,” as he likes to say, and a few of those paused programs are creeping forward.

A small containerization pilot has finally been implemented, to mixed reviews.

Another pilot testing public curbside composting bins has also been launched, which would help remove food waste (rat food) from the regular trash.

And a budget boost has helped increase corner litter basket collection 35 percent above pre-pandemic levels, says Sanitation spokesperson Joshua Goodman.

The design for the BetterBin program to replace the current rat friendly mesh litter baskets has been finalized, Goodman said, and the department is “currently working on the contracting process to determine a manufacturer.”

The Department of Health did not provide responses to questions about its current rodent mitigation activities, interagency mitigation efforts or rodent-related departmental changes as a consequence to the new budget.

Pat Marino, owner of Rat Trap Distributors Inc, the company selected for the pilot program, agrees that the buckets are no silver bullet or some sort of rat neutron bomb. His device, Marino says, is only one part of what has to be a multi-pronged strategy.

“Am I going to eliminate every single rat in every building in the city?” Marino said, “I don’t think so in reality, but I will make a difference.”

Marino tells his customers about the importance of securing garbage if they’re serious about tackling rats. He’s even developing his own rat-proof garbage container, becoming a one-stop-shop for the multi-front rat war.

Once Mayor Adams is more settled in his new city hall digs, Marino expects he’ll be called up to lease more traps with the city.

(The Mayor’s Office said that Chief of Staff Frank Carone has no financial involvement with neither Rat Trap Distribution Inc nor the Italian manufacturer of the bucket device, Ekommerce Srl.)

For those more expensive, complicated system changes to really get the rat problem under control, Frye says it might take something extremely serious, like a highly transmissive pathogen carried by rats, to spur action.

And with some evidence showing rodent infestations as a possible reservoir for future COVID mutations, maybe it’s time the city takes its furry denizens more seriously.