The town hall of New York has a strange idea of what a “dream job” is. The “city that never sleeps” offers a job as the “bloodthirsty” head of a municipal service dedicated to the “massacre” of millions of people of rats of the megalopolis, from 120,000 to 170,000 dollars a year.
The position of “Rodent Reduction Program Manager” at the New York City Council can become “your dream job”, as long as you are dedicated “24 hours a day, 7 days a week with tenacity and a sense of staging”, boasts a very serious announcement posted this wednesday by Mayor Eric Adams, a tough ex-cop who wants to fight against the scourges of his city. “There is NOTHING I hate as much as rats,” he hammered Thursday on Twitter, promising his fellow citizens, “Your dream job awaits.”
You must have “a killer instinct”
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 he visited the city in 1842.
Nearly two centuries later, “the ideal candidate” for Wednesday’s job posting “must be ultra driven, quite bloodthirsty, determined to look at all solutions from various angles, especially to improve operational efficiency, data collection, technological innovation, waste management and the large-scale abatement” of these parasites that proliferate in the streets and subways of New York.
New York’s booming mayor, a center-right African-American Democratic elected official, is offering an annual salary of $120,000 to $170,000 to “achieve the impossible” with a “virulent aversion to vermin” and “a reputation for ringworm “. The town hall also requires a degree, a first experience in urban planning and construction management, and above all “determination and killer instinct to fight the real enemy”.
Hunt with dogs to kill rats
Like many American cities, New York is also famous for its rodents. Especially because of the garbage bags left by residents and traders on the sidewalks, without containers.
Spending millions of dollars, the city regularly tests new techniques to eradicate rats, like dry ice or alcoholic baths: this is how the then mayor of the borough of Brooklyn presented this in 2019, during an unsustainable demonstration… or rather Eric Adams himself.
In 2021, after the pandemic, a private association of Manhattan residents called RATS organized hunts with their dogs to kill as many rats as possible.
