Know thine enemy: my eye-opening ‘rat walk’ with New York City’s ‘rat tsar’

An estimated 3 million rats live in New York City - so members of the Rat Pack' are working to ease human-rodent relations

I am standing near a tree bed in a bustling Brooklyn park, with only a few feet of dirt separating me from a small" family of rats - that's usually around 8 of them, I'm told. I've come on this rat walk" with a few dozen New Yorkers, all milling about awkwardly, subjecting ourselves to the kind of brainless small talk heard at speed dating events. But instead of looking for love, we've come to learn more about New York's rodent population. Tonight, knowing thy enemy means we must slink among the rats.

We're led by Kathleen Corradi, the city's famed rat tsar, appointed by Mayor Eric Adams in 2023, and we are united by our visceral hatred of rats. We don't want to see them scurry by on late-night walks home, or watch as they slink in and out of trash bags on the street. We especially don't want them in our homes. As one exterminator put it to famed metro reporter Joseph Mitchell back in 1944: If you get a few [rats] in your house, there are just two things you can do: you can wait for them to die, or you can burn your house down and start all over again."