How come rich and developed cities such as New York still unable to control their rat and mice population?
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There could never be complete control for a few reasons. Having lived in nyc myself ive concluded that there’s just too much trash in nyc, a lot of it being food waste. Rats seek food and know how and where to find it and rats are smart.
Another reason, nyc is a port. The ocean is literally right there. So imagine years of ships with rats already on them docked at nyc.
Third but not final. There are waaaay too many hiding spots for rats in nyc. Especially underground.
Cities have a lot of people living very densely. And that means a lot of food and a lot of hiding spots. The cities have done as much as they can with smaller improvements to reduce the rat population. But the problem is so great that they would have to reorganize the entire city to reduce the rat population further. One issue is that of getting garbage out of the city. The more garbage the more food for the rats, mice and pidgins. But if you want anything better then garbage men driving around collecting garbage as fast as they can you need to build an entirely new system to automatically take the garbage out of the city. The problem with building such a system is that there are tons of buildings and streets in the way. It is not cheap and it is not going to be built over night.
They simply don’t (and can’t) control most of the actual area of the city that isn’t a building or residence. Parks, streets, sewers, bodies of water, etc.
A city being “rich” rarely means its residents will get to materially benefit from the spending
Because the political will to bring the rat population down from ‘acceptable’ to ‘none’ does not exist in most places.
Others have touched on the major issues. But one they didn’t mention is how fast they reproduce.
So even if they did manage to completely kill every single rat in the city, unless they killed every rat in the world they would still have rats coming in from other places around them. And in no time they would be right back where they started.
One of the big reasons that is entirely stupid and preventable is that there used to be a regulation that all trash had to be in metal cans with tight lids. It helped a lot. Then the usual suspects (capitalism) got rid of it and now the trash is just in piles and piles. It’s awful. It also doesn’t help that now places aren’t letting staff take food home and refuse to give it away and are even locking dumpsters to prevent hungry people scavenging. Just means there’s more food waste for the rats to feed on.
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