The Decibel - Rat czars and pigeons on ‘The Pill’: cities wage war on pests

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

As long as there have been cities, there have been pest problems. Beneath our feet, rats scurry about and feed off our garbage. They breed quickly and plentifully. Above our heads, pigeons flock and dive, crowding around park benches and generally making a mess. The prairies have been contending with feral swine. Pest control has always been a delicate dance for cities, but now, they’re turning to new methods.Oliver Moore is the Globe’s urban affairs reporter. He’s on the show to talk about why rats and pigeons have such a hold on our cities, and what some cities are doing to curb the populations. The Globe’s Alanna Smith also joins to talk about the truth behind Alberta’s claims that they’re rat-free. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

If you live in a city, there are certain pests you're likely familiar with. You've probably seen a rat. You've almost definitely seen pigeons. We've tried lots of different ways to get rid of these animals in the past. Things like dogs that are trained to hunt rats. Or even by bringing in other predators to chase them away. Nothing has really worked that well. And the more we're developing our cities, the bigger a problem it becomes.

So now, some cities are trying new things, like birth control. Today, we're talking to our urban affairs reporter, Oliver Moore, about why there are so many rats and pigeons, and the different ways cities are dealing with them. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Oliver, great to have you back on the podcast. Always a pleasure. Cities, of course, have a lot of animal pests, but rats have a real reputation for being especially annoying. Where does their bad reputation come from?

I mean, you're right. Nobody loves a rat. I mean, you see people with pet rats sometimes, but the wild rat, I suspect there's not five people who would say, I love to see a wild rat. I think it's part, you know, they do have a reputation for disease. That reputation might be a little bit overblown, but they do carry diseases. I think there's a strong sense it's because they come into our space. You know, other creatures might come into the attic of your house or into your garage or whatever your space may be. But rats, they come in when you're sleeping. They move around at night. They skulk. They kind of set your teeth on edge.

And frankly, I think it's the tail. It's that long, naked, dragging tail. I mean, squirrels are basically, as someone told me, they're basically rats with bushy tails. If you're a squirrel, you're kind of benign, or maybe it's cute or whatever it is, but no one, I think, has that really visceral, ugh, to a squirrel, whereas I think rats bring that out in people. Interesting. Of course, they're in huge numbers in our cities, but let's examine this. How did so many rats end up in our cities? We're talking about the brown rat, which is sometimes called the Norway rat, misleadingly called the Norway rat because it's actually from Asia. And it's hitched a ride with humans basically around the world.

I think every continent except Antarctica has been colonized, if you will, by rats. And they follow us. They came with our ships. They swim to ships. They climb up ropes. They've settled in the same cities that we've settled in. And some of the experts I've talked to said they really reflect us, the way we live, the garbage we put out, the types of buildings we create.

The rat is kind of the mirror of us. It's the ultimate urban creature. So it's really, in a way, kind of adapted to how we live then. Very much. And they are here, as you say, in great numbers. I mean, we don't have any idea really of how many there are, except we know there's a lot. I mean, there's a guy in New York, Bobby Corgan. He's the go-to rat guy. And I think he said something like, I don't know how many rats are

in New York. I've been studying this for decades. He says, might be a few million, might be 10 million. Really, all we can track is rat complaints, which are a reasonable measure, but not a great measure because complaints are when they come into our garbage, they come into our property. If they're burrowing somewhere away from our property, such we don't see them, if they move around at night, we don't see them, they're still there, but you're not complaining about them. However, if there's construction, if there's maybe a garbage strike, if there's a reason that they're being sort of stirred up and on the move, and if there's a reason they have food, you'll see them and then complaints will pour in. Okay, so why are rat populations so

hard to control? I guess let's talk about how quickly they reproduce. They basically do two things. They eat and they breed. There's a guy who wrote a book called Rats about his time in a New York alley just studying the rats that were living there. And he's had a quote, something to the effect that if you're in New York or some other major city, you're never more than, I think, six feet away from two rats having sex. That's just what they do. And there's different numbers for it. But mathematically, I've heard that two rats could produce, in theory, 15,000 descendants in a year. I mean, that assumes that everyone survives and so on. I think it's that they reach maturity within a couple of weeks, and they could produce a litter quite regularly. And so there are

predators, there are reasons they die, they die by cars and so on. But in theory, they just breed and breed and breed. And if you start killing a bunch of them, I've heard from these, you know, Bobby Corgan, these expert types is that they actually breed faster to make up for the shortfall. I want to make sure I understand this 15,000 number, because that is a massive number. You said that's descendants then Oliver, right? So that's starting with two rats. Yeah, for lack of a better question. Not the Adam and Eve rat have 15,000 child rats. It's like each generation gets like a family tree of rats. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And then by the end of the year, you've got so many generations and the family tree is so large that you could, in theory, have 15,000. So how have cities tried to keep rat populations under control? What are some of the things that we've tried to do? I mean, eradication has been tried with poisons, with traps. And in fact, there are certain dogs that in Europe, I think a Dachshund might have been, is trained as a ratter. And part of the reason the Dachshund's shape is what it is, is it's trained to go down into a rat burrow, long and skinny. And then it's got a tail so you can pull them back out again.

New York has recently hired a rat czar because what they're really doing in New York that is by far the most effective thing is looking at putting garbages in containers. It's shocking when you come from a city that doesn't do it garbage this way. You go to New York and there's just giant piles of bags of garbage all over the place. That's just rat buffet. Yeah. And so New York is finally gradually moving towards a system of containerization, which is just, you know, you put your garbage in a bin of some sort. That will probably have more to do with controlling the rat population in New York than any other, I think, the czar might do.

And I heard in Ottawa, they're investigating rat reduce the sperm in the male rats and put the female rats into early menopause. And so we'll see. I mean, that has to jump a couple of hurdles. It has to be proved for use, and that has to actually be deployed, and then we'll see the result. And of course, Alberta, we should talk about. This is a jurisdiction that claims to be rat-free. Is that really true? How does that work? I have my doubts, but I say that as someone who is not from Alberta, and I know they're very proud of their rat-free status. And actually, my colleague Alana Smith in Alberta has reported on this issue exactly. Well, Alberta has made rats illegal in the province since the 1950s. But since then, it's been an all-out war.

And yes, we still have rats in our province. They come to recycling plants. They love places that have a lot of hay, like farms. And while we don't have any permanent population, which is why we can brag about being rat-free, we do get a couple stragglers that come in. They hitchhike on buses and trucks and cars. And so we're just in this all-out battle to get them out of Alberta for good. The battle to keep the brats out of Alberta is pretty boring,

generally speaking. It used to be a lot more fun, a lot more fireworks, but now we just have a couple of inspectors essentially that go across the border communities and they look for any sort of proof of life that rats have been in the area. And so once people think they've seen a rat, they can report that to Alberta's rat control program, our rat control inspectors, you could say, and they go check it out. And if it is a rat, then that rat's got to go. And if it isn't a rat, which, you know, the majority of the time it isn't, it's some other small creature like a vole, then they get to stay in Alberta. So we talked a little bit earlier about the reputation rats have, but I guess what is the reality in terms of health hazards?

Do they actually pose a danger to us? I mean, rats are not benign. You know, there is the psychological stress of rats, but there's also a real physical danger. I mean, they can carry, you know, hantavirus, you get salmonella, something alarmingly called rat bite fever. I mean, historically, they were blamed for the bubonic plague, even though I think research has mostly established that it was actually the fleas that were on the rats. I mean, net effect, similar. The rats were bringing the plague. The carrier of the carrier was on the rat. But that's not to say that rats are benign. You talk to researchers, and they've got these extraordinary terms. One of them called the rats a pathogen sponge, where they soak up things

and pass on. And others use the term a germ elevator because the rats bring stuff out of the sewers up into our level. So even if the risk they're posing is not great, the fact that they're coming up out of the sewers into our homes, there's clearly some risk there. But something I talked to said that a whole different angle on this that they have to consider is the psychological stress. That even if you're not getting physically sick from a rat, there's a great stress of having rats around. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people for a lot of rat stories, and very few people will tell you about having rats in their place. They'll talk about the rats in their garbage outside. They'll talk about the rat they saw

on the subway station. People don't like to admit they have a rat in their house or rats in their house because there's this stigma. I mean, it's associated unfairly with sort of sloth and poverty. That's not valid. I mean, a rat can eat rich man's garbage as well as a poor man's garbage, but there is that perception. And so I think people don't like to talk about it. And I think if you have rats or concerned you have rats, it really weighs on you in a way that has a negative health impact, even if it's not, you're actually sick in a physical sense. Yeah, that's an interesting point there. And you mentioned earlier, Oliver, about how rats get in our space and how that can be really upsetting to us too. Can I ask, are there stories that you've heard about people getting kind of up and close or rats getting up close

with people? I interviewed someone a few years ago who found a rat in his toilet. And I'd always thought it was an urban myth. This guy, he appeared credible. He was a basement toilet. He opened the lid, there was the rat. And I actually looked it up later and National Geographic did a test on this. They kind of had a cutaway toilet. And this rat, he went through that thing so fast, he just whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, and up he came. I mean, so I guess close the lid is the lesson from all this. And they're good swimmers. They are good swimmers. But probably the most vile rat anecdote I've come across in all this is that sometimes very young children will get bitten because they have food on their face.

And so they're sleeping. The rat comes around, basically is trying to nibble on the food and more as accidentally bites the child. Now we talk about the stress of a rat in your home. I'm not sure parents can imagine a stress greater than not just the rat in their home, the rat in their child's space nibbling on their child's face. The stress of that must be kind of off the charts. We'll be right back. All right, so we've been talking about rats, but let's also now talk about the so-called rats with wings, which is what some people call pigeons. Oliver, why are there so many pigeons in our cities?

They're a bit like rats. They kind of reflect us. We leave garbage out. They eat the garbage. They don't have a lot of great predators in cities. Some get run down by drivers, but there's not a lot of reasons for them to die. But they're here ultimately, I guess a bit like rats. Rats followed us. But pigeons, we kind of brought pigeons with us. Pigeons aren't native to North America. So pigeons generally, the ones you see here are descended from domesticated birds. Some of them were homing pigeons, racing pigeons. They might have been work pigeons.

They're here because of us. That doesn't necessarily mean people like them. There's a lot of people who are strongly opposed to pigeons. I mean, there's a song, 1958, a very jaunty song called Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. When they see us coming, the birdies all try and hide. But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide the sun's shining bright everything seems all right when we're poisoning pigeons in the park and people kind of laugh at all these sort of nasty bits about the cyanide or the strychnine um and it's you know

it's there's that animosity but but but not everyone as i say nobody likes wild rats but pigeons there are definitely people who like wild pigeons. You see people, they feed them. Some cities, including Toronto, have bylaws against feeding pigeons, and it doesn't seem to make an impact because I regularly see people with bags of food dropping them or bread, which is unfortunate because actually bread is bad for pigeons. And so people think they're doing a nice thing for the pigeon, dropping bread, and they're actually not helping the pigeon the way they might think they are. Wow. And of course, lots of cities are trying to reduce the pigeon population. You mentioned these bylaws that Toronto has about feeding pigeons. Toronto's going even further because we are also trying birth control on these pigeons as well. So Oliver, just tell us about this program. How does pigeon birth control work? Yeah, I mean, I describe it as birth control

and it's not exactly birth control because they still do lay eggs, but it messes with the physiology of the egg so the egg doesn't hatch properly. One benefit of that is that if you just prevented a bird laying the egg, the bird would immediately sort of try and start that process again.

And so this allows the bird, perhaps cruelly you might say, to lay an egg, think they're doing things, things are working, and then the egg just doesn't hatch. This program has been running for a bit over a year. We're going to do a one-year pilot project, and I've extended it through the end of this year to get more data. Five sites in the city, they're very, very cagey about where those sites are. I think they don't want bystanders and rubberneckers to go look at it, but they also don't want, I think, bird lovers to mess with it. So it works. Like humans, they have to take this at the same time.

So once a day, it dispenses. And the birds, you know, pigeons are quite smart as birds go, and they've learned this. There's trail cams set up with these dispensers, and the birds are flocking in. They're coming in. They're waiting for that food. It dispenses. They eat it. And in theory, they will have these defective eggs. It's a nutritional system. It'll take time for it to work because all you're doing is you're removing the next generation or some of the next generation. And it assumes that they actually are going to eat this feed at sufficient dose every day.

And so far, there's not really evidence. It's working out really evidence. It's not working in a party. It goes back to the numbers question. We don't know how many pigeons there are. I talked to the head of animal services and she said, anecdotally, she thought the pigeon population had been going up in recent years, but maybe that's just because we're an increasingly vertical city and pigeons perch. And so people see pigeons on their balconies, they see pigeons elsewhere. And so they think

there's more of them. It's a bit like the rat question. If you see a rat, you think it's a rat that's new to you. That said, anecdotally, they also think the program is starting to work. They feel like they're seeing fewer pigeons at these sites. So, you know, the jury's out, and I'm not sure how much they'll ever be able to judge its effectiveness, but it's an interesting approach. So have other cities tried this pigeon birth control? Like, do we know how well it's worked elsewhere? Yeah, it's a private company that sells this particular product, and they have a number of cities that they can point to, and there's been some scientific research as well.

Barcelona is interesting because one study found that some pigeon colonies were cut in half, which is a pretty good result, while others were unaffected. A different study in Barcelona found the citywide population of pigeons did not change, which suggests that there's a sort of a filling in, that this population is going down, this other population is rising, but overall it's similar. In Canada, in Vancouver, the transit agency TransLink tried it at some of their SkyTrain stations. And I think my understanding is it's been mixed success, that the population may have stabilized or declined a little bit, but not the kind of 50% that we've seen in some other

cities. One researcher I talked to said that a problem there, a kind of confounding effect, was that, again, the human feeders. So the dispenser is putting out the laced food, but the humans are dropping different food. And so there's competition for the food. So the birds may not get the drugged food or may not get it as often or as regularly or every day or whatever it is. Okay. Yeah. So there's a whole bunch of factors that can't really be controlled there. Absolutely. I mean, these are wild animals or feral animals in a wild space. Just lastly here, Oliver, I mean, we've talked about how we deal with these pests and how we see them really negatively, but that also sounds like they're pretty resilient creatures, right?

When we talk about how rats and pigeons have survived, I guess, is there anything to be said in defense of these animals? Well, they're definitely smart. I mean, you know, put it in perspective. I mean, not dolphins, but they're definitely smart. They do, to some extent, clean up our mess. Rats have arguably saved millions of lives through medical testing. And there's a whole philosophical debate about whether that's a good thing or not, but they have saved those lives. There were periods where we used them in a sort of a, almost as tools. You know, in war, pigeons were used as messengers. In early days of forest fire detection, you could have a pilot up scanning for fires. And once they identified a fire, they could attach a

message to a pigeon with the coordinates, launch the pigeon, the pigeon would go to wherever on the ground and pass on the message. I mean, so there are some good sides. I read this US sociologist said that pigeons were viewed kind of favorably or worse, benignly for a long time in cities. But then as cities became more modern, they became more antiseptic, moods shifted and pigeons became seen as this dirty pest. You know, that reputation is hard to shake. I know someone who was vacationing on her honeymoon, in fact, in Paris, in France. She ate pigeon. She got sick. She was telling a local about, you know, being sick and she'd eaten the pigeon. And the local said in a very French way, le pigeon, it is a dirty bird.

And so that, you know, that reputation is, it's now solid, even though in many cultures, it's on the menu as well. Oliver, this was so interesting. Thank you for being here. Always a pleasure. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. This episode was edited and mixed by Kevin Sexton. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy-McLaughlin, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.