Watch Dateline's documentary 'Rat Hunters' at 9.30pm on Tuesday 2 May on SBS or stream via SBS On Demand.
Kanielle Hernandez is a single mother who lives in one of the poorest districts in New York’s Lower East Side. The windows of her apartment overlook a pile of black bags filled with rubbish that have become a feeding site for rats.
“I would just look out the window to see and I would be astonished. I'm like, ‘Oh, my God, look at all these rats!’” she told Dateline.
“I would literally hear them fighting and scrambling, and I started recording, and I would record dozens of them.”
“Look at them,” she says, getting agitated as she notices a movement in the pile that soon reveals three rats. “They're just playing and chasing each other. And this is what we see on a daily basis.”
New York City resident Kanielle Hernandez talks to Dateline about a rat infestation in her neighbourhood. Credit: SBS Dateline
New York's rat czar
Now New York’s ongoing war on rats is entering a new stage with the appointment of the city’s first-ever ‘rat czar’ last week. The term czar is often used in US media to describe high-ranking public officials.
A former teacher, Kathleen Corradi, whose official job title is ‘citywide director of rodent mitigation’, isn’t new to this line of work. She previously oversaw rat mitigation efforts in the city’s public schools.
“You’ll be seeing a lot of me - and a lot less rats,” Corradi said at a news conference on 12 April. “There’s a new sheriff in town.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams, left, introduces Kathleen Corradi, centre, as the city's first-ever citywide director of rodent mitigation, also known as the "rat czar." Source: AP / Bobby Caina Calvan
The size of the city’s rat population is unknown. A 2014 study put the figure at around two million, or one for every four residents.
New York Mayor Eric Adams has implemented other measures aimed at what he called the city’s “No. 1 enemy.”
In recent months, his administration has limited the number of hours that rubbish bags can sit on sidewalks awaiting pickup and launched a curbside composting program intended to reduce food waste.
Meanwhile, rats have invaded even Kanielle’s car.
Opening the boot of her Jeep, she points at wet patches of rat urine and brown pellets of rat faeces on the car engine. More tellingly, there’s a thin imprint of a rat tail. Kanielle has been unsuccessfully trying to deter them with chilli powder.
“It just always smells like a rat,” she said.
“I had a car before this in the same spot. And they ate through my wires and caused an electrical fire and the whole car burnt down.”
Besides bad odour, rats carry parasites and diseases. In 2021, 14 New Yorkers contracted leptospirosis, a bacterial infection spread through water, soil, and food contaminated with rat urine. One person died from it.
I would just look out the window to see and I would be astonished. I'm like, ‘Oh, my God, look at all these rats!'Kanielle Hernandez
Kanielle is worried about the impact that the daily exposure to rats might have on her and her young kids.
“I might not see the damage now, but maybe I’ll see damage later in life from ingesting this smell, you know. It’s definitely not good.”
- additional reporting by Reuters.
