New York City Seeks Chief Ratslayer

Eric Adams, then Brooklyn Borough President, announced the results of a pilot program against rats in September 2019.ANGELA WEISS (AFP)

A simple white T-shirt, at the

price of $48, is the emblem of a campaign by the mayor of New York to end the plague of rats in the city.

The graphic printed on the garment shows a sweaty mouse trapped in a forbidden sign, from which he tries to escape, and the caption: “Rats don't rule this city.

We do.

[Signed] The Department of Sanitation”, the person in charge of collecting garbage or cleaning the streets of snow.

Apart from the shirt, the campaign consists of a job offer, that of anti-

.

A “dream” job, as the mayor describes it, and faith that the remuneration is: an annual salary between 120,000 and 170,000 dollars, which many would like in the city that has just confirmed its position as the most expensive in the world.

The candidate must meet the characteristics of a Hollywood movie

: a murderous ambition, absolute dedication, 24 hours a day, seven a week, for which reason New York is the city that never sleeps;

a lust for blood that justifies the "sacrifice" of millions of rats in the Big Apple, with more than eight and a half million inhabitants... and according to a widespread urban legend, the same number of rodents.

Other sources multiply and even triple the presence of the mammal.

As early as 1842 the English novelist Charles Dickens complained that they were everywhere.

The position is officially called "director of the rodent reduction program" but everyone already calls him

.

Another requirement, in addition to working tirelessly, is to do it "with tenacity and spectacularity."

It is a bombastic, strident announcement, one of those that the mayor likes so much, defender of a strong hand against crime and, now, with rodents, "the real enemy" of the city according to the Mayor's Office.

But the ad to hire a

It is as serious and as real as the one known the day before, much more disturbing: the internment against their will of homeless people with mental problems, at the discretion of the police officers who patrol the streets and the subway, an announcement that with the passing of the hours It's coming back like a boomerang against the alderman.

Civil and human rights organizations have cried out against Adams's initiative, considering it an attack on human dignity and hardly effective.

Adams, a moderate Democrat -the label moderate, or centrist, applied to a Democrat sometimes borders on the Republican- intends to fight firmly against all the ills that afflict the city, from armed violence to the presence of homeless people in the subway and the plague of vermin.

The ex-policeman has admitted his phobia of rats.

"There is NOTHING I hate more than rats," he confessed this Thursday on the social network Twitter, to push his fellow citizens who feel "virulent aversion to vermin" to consider the offer.

“The job of your dreams awaits you,” Adams concludes.

The official announcement stresses that the position implies “high-impact, high-visibility leadership.”

The "ideal candidate" for Ratslayer in Chief "must be ultra-motivated" -in case the salary motivation was insufficient, it can be assumed-, bloodthirsty, proactive and creative, with the ability to examine all kinds of solutions, including improving efficiency operations, the collection and evaluation of data, technological innovation, the management of urban waste - whose spread on the sidewalks is partly attributed to the proliferation of bugs - and, most importantly, "large-scale slaughter", a point that has already put animal groups on social networks on a war footing.

To get the position, it is not enough just to be daring or willful, nor is it a modern Pied Piper of Hamelin, since a degree is required in some field related to urban planning, in addition to experience in managing, it is not known if murderous, of projects .

New York has spent millions of dollars trying to stamp out the rat population, which multiplies exponentially on each excavated site for new construction;

under the platforms of the terraces and the beach bars that bars and restaurants built during the pandemic to serve outdoors and, starting at four in the afternoon, on the sidewalks, from which gigantic garbage bags are taken out that serve for hours of grass to the critters.

A recent proclamation from the mayor's office, asking the porters not to take out the garbage until eight in the evening to avoid prolonged exposure of waste, has not worked as effectively as expected.

Neither did dry ice or alcohol baths, techniques previously used, or the alleged mousetrap with Oreo cookie crumbs that, according to Adams himself in 2019, when he presided over the county of Brooklyn,

It would be the ideal remedy to capture them.

Why New York rats like Oreo cookies, and not, for example, gingerbread or cinnamon cookies, is unknown.

Despite the evident presence of rodents in New York -you only have to walk a street at dusk to cross, if not literally, physically run into one of them-, the Big Apple is not the worst place judging by the statistics .

Boston and Philadelphia had a higher percentage in 2021, according to the

, a study based on the number of sightings.

At the head of all the cities in the country, Boston registered 21.6%, followed by Philadelphia, with 19.5%, and New York, with

15.3%.

The cleanest city was Phoenix, with 3.5%.

In addition to the visceral disgust that they cause in most humans, the research recalled that rats can also contaminate food, kill power lines by chewing on cables or urinate on them, and transmit diseases.