New York City announced on Wednesday the appointment of its first “director of the rodent reduction program”, a city hall department dedicated to slaughtering millions of rats in the American megacity.
The appointment of Kathleen Corradi comes four months after the city published a job offer from the municipality which said it was looking for a “bloodthirsty” chief.
According to a tenacious urban legend, there are as many rats in New York as there are people, or nearly nine million. The famous English novelist Charles Dickens had already complained about it when visiting the city in 1842.
Rodents are regularly seen in the streets, on subway platforms, or in garbage cans in the “city that never sleeps”. A rat rose to internet fame in 2015 when a video showed him running down the stairs of a subway station with a whole slice of pizza in his mouth.
A salary of 155,000 dollars per year
“New York may be famous for the ‘Pizza Rat’, but rats and the conditions that help them spread will no longer be tolerated: no more dirty sidewalks, abandoned spaces, or brazenly dug burrows,” Kathleen Corradi said in a statement.
This former teacher and expert in waste management will be paid 155,000 dollars a year, according to the New York Times. At the time of the job posting, Mayor Eric Adams, a tough ex-cop who wants to fight his city’s plagues, said, “There’s NOTHING I hate more than rats. “.
The “ideal candidate” for the job offer had to be “ultra-motivated, quite bloodthirsty, and determined to examine all the solutions from various angles” but also have “determination and a killer instinct” for “the large-scale culling” of pests.
Spending millions of dollars, the municipality regularly tries new techniques to eradicate rats, such as dry ice or alcohol baths: this was presented in 2019, during an unsustainable demonstration, the mayor at the time of the borough of Brooklyn… already Eric Adams. And an association of Manhattan residents, called RATS, regularly organizes hunts with their dogs to kill as many rats as possible.
