Whether or not Bostonians are seeking out rats this way, the public does notice them. Rat complaints made to the city’s 311 system for non-emergency service requests soared during the pandemic, the Globe has reported; last year, the city logged 3,949 reports of the rodents. In November, a Seaport rat boldly ran up a man’s leg. In January, a rat ended up in someone’s toilet in Somerville.
Boston has responded, the way many cities do, with brute force: poisons, dry ice, bait boxes, snap traps, and other methods. City Councilor Ed Flynn has called for the establishment of a pest control department or for the city to have its own rat czar. Additional support is a good idea, but it won’t change the fact that extermination measures are labor-intensive and often ineffective, and rat poisons can kill owls, eagles, and other raptors, nature’s exterminators.
There is an alternative to all this, and it involves a fundamental shift in how we think about — and relate to — our furry neighbors: Cohabitation.
This sounds like a call for mayhem, but hear me out. Bostonians are already living with the rats — on their terms. It’s time to think about what our terms are, and what a livable future for both species looks like.
Paris has made headlines for floating this very idea. The city has been studying cohabitation since 2021, including assessing the true health risks rats pose and how to counter the prejudices people harbor against them.
“What we’re doing now is obviously not working,” says Kaylee Byers, an assistant professor in the faculty of health sciences at Simon Fraser University who has extensively studied the rat population in Vancouver. “Part of that is that our current approach has been ‘see a rat, kill a rat.’”
This method is inefficient, she says, because extermination rarely removes all of the rats from a population, and the reproduction rates of rats with access to food and water are so high that they’ll replace themselves in no time. Meanwhile, getting rid of one group of rats can just create prime real estate for another group to move in.
Marieke Rosenbaum, an assistant professor and research veterinarian at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, says many people have an exaggerated idea of the health dangers brought by rats. “They can carry and transmit diseases we can catch,” she acknowledges, “but the reality is that, at least in most North American cities, [transmission] doesn’t happen with high frequency.” However, some populations, such as the unhoused, can be at increased risk, Rosenbaum adds.
There’s no doubt that diseases from rats can be dangerous. New York City has seen a spike in cases of leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that can be passed from animals to humans and, when untreated, can potentially be fatal. (The bacteria that causes the disease can be found in the urine of infected rats, and passed to people when handling garbage, or through contact with contaminated water or soil.)
But Byers says the emotional toll of dealing with rats, especially in the home, can cause very real mental health effects as well. “They can cause stress and anxiety,” she says. “People that I’ve spoken to have mentioned helplessness and hopelessness.”
People often have these reactions because we associate rats with unsanitary conditions, and for good reasons.
“There’s a saying in the pest control industry that the best defense against a rat is a good trash can,” Rosenbaum says. Rats are “opportunists,” she explains, and because of how quickly humans in urban environments produce sumptuous, Michelin Star garbage, their populations directly track with ours.
Managing the rat population, experts say, will require cities to change. Properly disposing of waste will not only bring the number of rats down, it will also protect people from potentially dangerous contact with them. If there are fewer rats rooting around in our trash, then more people might be receptive to thinking of them less as pests, and more as urban wildlife, like squirrels.
For those still effusively anti-rat, it’s important to be realistic about what our end goals are. Rats are part of urban ecosystems.
“The ideal is to get them to a level where they’re not disturbing people, and causing any sort of emotional or physical or health-related risks,” Rosenbaum says, “but we’ll never be able to eradicate them.”
If rat numbers are manageable, then I suspect more people (like me) will find the occasional rat appearance amusing, and not terrifying. Maybe. That would be ideal, because they aren’t going anywhere.
“They’re really resilient. They can rebound really fast if you knock them down,” Rosenbaum says. “I think that they are going to out-survive us on this planet.”
Lauren Hunt is a freelance writer and graduate student based in Boston. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
