Why Does Everyone Hate Rats? (Update)

8:11Nils Stenseth:We're not going to discuss a number. It's kind of futile. And then anything you put out there then gets used as this watermark of it was 3 million in 2024. Someone else said it was 8 million in 2006. It's an unfair assessment.

8:25Kathy Corradi:Now, let me go back to your official title, Director of Rodent Mitigation. Does that include squirrels, chipmunks, etc.?

8:33Nils Stenseth:Squirrels, chipmunks, mice, all other rodents in the city. The main focus is on rats. There's more of a community aspect when it comes to rats. They're commensal, meaning they sit at the table with us. What is that word you used, commensal? Yes, commensal. What does that mean? It literally means like a seat at the table, meaning that they are thriving and existing because of the plate we've set for them in our urban spaces. Certainly the house mouse in a lot of regards is more successful, we can say, than a rat in terms of how it breeds and how it occupies urban spaces and non-urban spaces. But rats are known for their ability to exploit and thrive where humans are densest.

9:17Kathy Corradi:How do you think about rats versus the other rodents that are sometimes a problem? Rats look like bigger mice, sort of. And then there are squirrels, which most people seem to think are really cute. And people feed squirrels outside. I've never seen anybody feeding a rat outside. But is a rat just a squirrel with less attractive body hair?

9:37Nils Stenseth:In a way. And I would say people are unintentionally feeding rats all the time across our city. Maybe they're not throwing acorns or peanuts, but almost all of human behaviors in urban spaces end up feeding rats. How smart are rats? They are smart. I have not seen anything like a comparative IQ test for them.

9:57Kathy Corradi:I mean, chipmunks always look pretty dumb to me. They're super cute, but they look dumb. Maybe I'm wrong.

10:02Nils Stenseth:I would say, you know, in terms of how we gauge savviness, the rat is right up there. There's more and more research coming out about them and empathy and laughing and altruism. Yeah. And what we know is in terms of adaptability to survive, there's few species greater. They will avoid new things in their environment because they're unsure if they're harmful or helpful. There are stories of less dominant rats being sent out to test a new food source and then being monitored to see if there's ill effects. So they are survivors. And I would say no one except humans exploits an urban space better.

10:44Kathy Corradi:Rats have been exploiting New York City's urban space for at least a few hundred years. The ancestors of today's rats are thought to have arrived in the 18th century on ships from Europe. But in the historical rat timeline, that is still relatively recent. Genetically, they date back to the time of dinosaurs. Today, there are two main species, the black rat, Radus radus, which likely originated in India. And then the brown rat that we are familiar with, Radus nervegicus, the Norway rat, even though it did not originate in Norway. So why is it called that?

11:20Bethany Brookshire:Because everybody who hates rats wants to name them after somebody they don't like.

11:26Kathy Corradi:That is Bethany Brookshire.

11:28Bethany Brookshire:So basically, the name stuck because somebody was picking a fight with Norway at the time.

11:32Kathy Corradi:Brookshire is a science journalist with a PhD in physiology and pharmacology. She recently published a book called Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains. So you can see where her allegiance lies. Here is some more rat history.

11:49Bethany Brookshire:Europe was very black rat dominated until we think the 17th or 18th centuries when we began to see the brown rat. That is native to what we think of as Mongolia. Ratus norvegicus ended up getting spread into Europe and then with colonialism, it just went everywhere else because rats and boats go together real good. Interestingly, people have not liked rats but they didn't necessarily consider them disgusting until about the 18th or 19th century. People didn't like them because they were a problem of the food supply, right? They would get in and they would eat your food and nobody wants that. But they weren't considered to be disgusting in terms of they weren't considered to carry disease for a very long time.

12:39Bethany Brookshire:The association of rats with disease is a relatively recent one.

12:44Kathy Corradi:How did that association come to be made and how much does it intersect with the plague in Europe?

12:49Bethany Brookshire:It intersects with the plague, but not when you think it does. So there have been three major pandemics of plague that we know of in recorded history. The first was the Plague of Justinian, which I believe was in the 6th century. The second was the Black Death, which was famous and began in the 14th century. The third global pandemic of bubonic plague is now. It began in the 19th century, but it persists even now, actually, people every year in the United States, in Mongolia and in Madagascar in particular get plague.

13:24Kathy Corradi:To be clear, the plague persists today in very small numbers, just a few hundred reported cases a year, fewer than a dozen in the U.S. But this third wave of bubonic plague has done terrible damage over the past hundred years in India, especially during the early 20th century and in Vietnam during its war in the 1960s and 70s. The plague is caused by a bacterium known as Yersinia pestis. You see, it's right there in the name, Yersinia pestis. The Yersinia part comes from Alexandre Yersin, the first scientist to describe and culture these bacteria.

14:04Bethany Brookshire:The bubonic plague is technically not a disease of humans. It is a disease of rats and fleas that happens to spill over into humans from time to time with catastrophic effects.

14:16Kathy Corradi:And how much do we know about how the plague is spread?

14:19Bethany Brookshire:What we do know is that fleas get Yersinia pestis and then the bacteria forms a biofilm inside the esophagus of the rat flea and the biofilm coats the esophagus so that the rat flea can't swallow. It's just biting and biting and biting and biting, but it can't swallow anything and it starves to death. And you start to feel really bad for the flea until you realize that everything it bites, it's barfing up little bits of bacteria into the bite, spreading plague. So that's how plague is traditionally transmitted.

14:58Kathy Corradi:Okay. And then how is plague spread between humans? For that, we will bring in another scientist.

15:04Ed Glaeser:In humans, it can be spread partly by ectoparacides or by droplets. So coughing, when you're having a cold, then that's a way of transmission.

15:16Kathy Corradi:That is Niels Christian Stenseth, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Oslo.

15:22Ed Glaeser:And for the last 25 years or so, I've been studying plague, Erosenia pestis, the bacterium that caused the Black Death.

15:31Kathy Corradi:The Black Death tore through Europe in the mid-14th century. It is hard to believe just how brutal it was.

15:39Ed Glaeser:The Black Death killed half of the European population in a year or two. The plague expresses itself in the human being in three different forms. The most common one is bubonic, where it's swellings on the body. That may evolve into a pneumonic one that goes into the lung. and both might develop into a form that goes into the blood. If you're infected by Eosinopestis, if you don't come to a doctor within four or five days, you can consider yourself being dead.

16:18Kathy Corradi:During the Middle Ages, it was neither rats nor fleas who were thought to be responsible for the Black Death. Most of the blame was put on witches and Jews, But time and science eventually caught up with the rats. And if anything is going to give an animal species a bad reputation, it's killing off half of Europe. The association between rats and plague remains strong today. In the opening credits of The Decameron, a Netflix show set during the Black Death, a massive swarm of rats come together to spell out the title. A recent remake of the film Nosferatu shows a pack of rats following the vampire, carrying the plague with them.

17:00Kathy Corradi:But were rats really responsible for the Black Death?

17:05Ed Glaeser:That's the one that most people think are the right one. They are wrong.

17:09Kathy Corradi:That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.

17:23Ed Glaeser:OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to$400 ,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A-plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star trust pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at OnDeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. An undisturbed sleep is a beautiful thing. That's why a Beautyrest mattress is designed to give you unparalleled motion separation.

18:01Ed Glaeser:Isolating movement with our pocketed coil technology to help you sleep soundly no matter what's moving on the other side of the bed. While providing individualized support for every sleeping position.

18:16Ed Glaeser:People at their best get their Beautyrest for 100 years. Yo, it's Jay Uso from WWE. And I'm Jimmy Uso. Chumba Casino and WWE are hyped for the biggest event of the summer, SummerSlam. I know, I can't wait. There's nothing better to do while we're waiting than playing Chumba Casino. Sign up today and you can win a VIP experience. With Chumba Casino and with WWE for SummerSlam. So what are you waiting for? Play Chumba Casino and enter for your chance to win. Let's Chumba! Only available in permitted states. No purchase necessary. See terms and conditions for details. VGW Group. Void but prohibited by law.

18:52Ed Glaeser:21 Plus. Sponsored by Chumpa Casino.

18:58Kathy Corradi:One reason that rats are so despised is because they spread disease. The most famous instance being the Black Death, a pandemic of bubonic plague in the 14th century that killed millions upon millions of Europeans. But scientists have recently challenged the claim that rats caused the Black Death. Scientists including Niels Christian Stensef at the University of Oslo. Challenging a claim like this is not a simple thing.

19:26Ed Glaeser:I usually say to my students that if you want to have enemies within science, study plague. Because there are so many strong personalities and there are so many different opinions and they hate each other.

19:39Kathy Corradi:The standard epidemiological model of the Black Death is that humans were exposed to the plague by rats who had been bitten by diseased fleas. But in 2018, Stenseth and his colleagues published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences where they presented a different model. Despite the historical significance of the disease, they wrote, the mechanisms underlying the spread of plague in Europe are poorly understood. While it is commonly assumed that rats and their fleas spread plague, there is little historical and archaeological support for such a claim. We show that human ectoparasites like body lice and human fleas might be more likely than rats to have caused the rapidly developing epidemics.

20:26Kathy Corradi:And what is Stenseth's evidence that rats were not responsible for the Black Death? He and his co-authors looked at plague death rates from the 1300s to the 1700s, drawn from census records and historical accounts from cities, including London, Barcelona, Florence. Based on the velocity at which the plague spread in these places, Stenseth concluded, the human parasite model was much more likely than the rat parasite model.

20:56Ed Glaeser:It became very clear that rats could not have played a major role in the spread of play in Europe.

21:06Ed Glaeser:One of the reasons why the rat-led plagues need to be slow is the rat has to die before the flea leaves the rat. So the flea stays on the rat as long as the rat's alive. It's only when the rat dies that the flea then hops to a human host. And that is Ed Glazer. I'm the Fred Neller Glimp, professor of economics at Harvard University.

21:24Kathy Corradi:That's right. Glazer is an economist, not an epidemiologist or a biologist or even a rat expert. But Glazer is an expert in cities, which is where rats thrive and where disease spreads. And when we told him we were working on this rat series, he did some extra credit reading.

21:43Ed Glaeser:I have now read enough in various academic journals that it seems like we have a consensus. This was not by and large rat carried. They do seem to have played a critical role in the third bubonic plague explosion, although probably not in the first two.

21:58Kathy Corradi:So having determined that, that there is at least some guilt of the rat in at least the third pandemic, but perhaps not the most famous, the Black Death, how would you say that the modern day reputation of the rat has been affected by or informed by its implication in past disease carrying?

22:17Ed Glaeser:So blaming the rat is pretty much, you know, game over in terms of the rat's global reputation. I think we should also just object to using the word guilt on rats. It's not like they know what's going on. They're dying, too. I mean, let's push the guilt where it belongs. Let's go to Yersinia pestis itself. That's where the evil lies.

22:35Kathy Corradi:Glazer is the author of a book called Triumph of the City, how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier. And the fact is that cities and rats seem to be an inevitable pairing. In the ruins of Pompeii, there were rats. To estimate the size of human populations in ancient cities, modern scientists use archaeological evidence of rat populations.

23:02Ed Glaeser:When cities are at their best, they do enable people who are outsiders to thrive. It's hard to imagine more of an outsider than a rat.

23:08Kathy Corradi:To an economist, do rats present an obvious economic angle or maybe even multiple ones? Well, sure.

23:16Ed Glaeser:Rats are, you know, they're agents of usually negative externalities within cities, right? So they're part of what enables diseases to spread across people and consequently they're somewhat risky. I don't know what positive things we get out of rats, but there probably are some in the same sense that, you know, The four pest program that Mao followed, he thought getting rid of the sparrows was great. It turns out the sparrows kept the locusts under control. And without the sparrows, the locusts went haywire and destroyed the crops, leading to a massive famine.

23:45Kathy Corradi:Now, there was reportedly a big surge in rat population in New York City starting around 2020. I'm curious to know your thoughts on why. Obviously, COVID is a factor to consider. There were in the aftermath of COVID the eruption of hundreds, maybe thousands of outdoor dining sheds outside of restaurants. So I'm curious what you think of all that.

24:06Ed Glaeser:Certainly, COVID seems to have played some kind of a role. I mean, there were a whole bunch of city services that diminished because people were working from home or just weren't going in and so forth. So I wouldn't rule that out completely. Certainly, changes in the food availability seem likely to be quite important. This would feel a lot better with some kind of measurement.

24:24Kathy Corradi:Now, if I recall correctly, you were born and raised in Manhattan. Indeed. One could imagine that rats destroy or degrade the reputation of a city like New York. Do you put much stock in that argument?

24:35Ed Glaeser:Oh, that seems a little bit far-fetched to think that it's such an important deal. I would say that what rats effectively do is they reduce the density level for people. And so they tend not to be density multipliers about the good things about cities, which are, you know, enabling us to learn from one another. I've never heard of a rat carrying a message that was effectively interpreted. But they do seem to carry the negative stuff that we get from being close to one another.

25:01Nils Stenseth:There's an economic impact as well. So thinking about damages to property.

25:06Kathy Corradi:They like to chew wires, don't they?

25:08Nils Stenseth:They like to chew everything.

25:10Kathy Corradi:That's former New York City rat czar Kathy Karate.

25:13Nils Stenseth:That is literally their nature to chew. They chew through holes in foundations. They can damage different food sources. You know, when we're thinking about storage of food and grains and things of that nature, there's, you know, a human cost in terms of public health and then mental well-being. the mental effects on folks living in and around rats. That's well-documented and being studied even more. You know, stress, anxiety, depression, documented. Peer-reviewed papers saying this is real. There's also a public health risk. Leptospirosis is one of the more famous illnesses associated with rats, and that's due to a bacteria that they can transmit through their urine.

25:53Nils Stenseth:So there's real public health concerns.

25:55Kathy Corradi:Although, from what I've seen, the last number is 2023. It looked like in New York City, 24 people were diagnosed with leptospirosis, the highest number of reported cases in a single year. But this city of over 8 million. So that sounds like a pretty minor threat, no?

26:10Nils Stenseth:I'm with you. It's certainly not the highest public health risk we have across, you know, our city or the globe.

26:16Kathy Corradi:But that's also people. I understand dogs get leptospirosis as well. And that maybe is a bigger problem for New Yorkers?

26:23Nils Stenseth:Yes, dogs have a vaccine for leptospirosis. There was other, I'd say, unrealized potential public health risks when it comes to rats. So a paper out of Columbia University studied rats across New York City and looked at the different lice, ticks, fleas they carried and also looked at different viruses, pathogens that were existing on their bodies and found a bunch of novel viruses that were living on them. There's always this threat when we're talking about viruses, about their potential to mutate and jump hosts. Because rats are so close to us in where and how they live, that threat just gets higher and higher.

27:02Kathy Corradi:Coming up after the break, is the threat of disease really what this is about? The fact that we're so quick to blame the rat says a lot about us. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio, and we will be rat back. I'm sorry, we will be right back.

27:46Ed Glaeser:attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. A beauty rest mattress gives you unparalleled motion separation, isolating movement with our pocketed coil technology, while providing individualized support for every sleeping position. People at their best get their beauty rest for 100 years. Yo, it's Jay Uso from WWE, and I'm Jimmy Uso. Chumba Casino and WWE We are hyped for the biggest event of the summer, SummerSlam. I know. I can't wait. There's nothing better to do while we're waiting than playing Chumbo Casino.

28:22Ed Glaeser:Sign up today and you can win a VIP experience. With Chumbo Casino and with WWE for SummerSlam. So what are you waiting for? Play Chumbo Casino and enter for your chance to win. Let's Chumbo.

28:33Kathy Corradi:No purchase necessary. VGW Group Voidware prohibited by law. CT &C's 21 Plus. Sponsored by Chumbo Casino.

28:43Kathy Corradi:A rat is a rodent, a member of the order Rodentia, which contains over 2 ,000 species. Nearly half of all mammals are rodents. They are famous for their gnawing ability, which is carried out by large pairs of upper and lower front incisors. Squirrels, mice, beavers, hamsters, prairie dogs, porcupines, they are all rodents. But it seems fair to say that rats are the most despised member of this order. Why? For that, let's go back to Bethany Brookshire.

29:18Bethany Brookshire:I'm the author of the 2022 book, Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains.

29:24Kathy Corradi:Talk about just the title itself and what kind of work you're asking that word pests to do.

29:32Bethany Brookshire:Oh, man. Pests, the word, does so much work in our society just in general. It has become a word for animals that are not where we want them to be. And that was one of the things that I became really fixated on is the fact that the animals that we hate are so subjective. The animals are just being animals. They're about us. They're about where we think animals belong and what we think those animals should be doing.

30:08Kathy Corradi:Do you think the rat has been unfairly tarnished its reputation over time by having been associated with the Black Death?

30:14Bethany Brookshire:I don't know that it's been unfairly tarnished. I certainly think there was probably a place for it. I do think the fact that we're so quick to blame the rat says a lot about us. Because the reality is the thing that causes most diseases in humans, like communicable diseases, is other humans. Right? We're the major vectors of disease to each other. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that.

30:43Kathy Corradi:Humans do like to assign blame to other animals. But as Brookshire points out, the blame can be assigned somewhat randomly. Consider the rabbit. The rabbit is not a rodent, although it used to be classified as such. Today, it is considered a lagomorph since it has four upper incisors, not two. For most people, the rabbit is thought of as, I believe the technical term is cute. It's fluffy. It hops. It has facial features that kind of look like a human baby. If we think of rats as trash eaters, we think of rabbits as carrot nibblers. So cute. But not everywhere is the rabbit considered so benign.

31:28Kathy Corradi:In Australia, where rabbits nibble some$125 million worth a year of agricultural crops, there is a new rabbit czar tasked with curbing the Australian bunny population. In her book, Bethany Brookshire writes about many other animals who are considered pests in some circumstances, even if they don't deserve to be, like snakes and elephants and coyotes and the well-known bird that some people today call rats with wings.

31:59Bethany Brookshire:The pigeon became domesticated around 8 ,000 years ago, we think, which makes it one of the earliest domesticated birds. Pigeons were cornerstones of many societies. They were incredibly important, not just for food, though we absolutely ate them. If you've never had squab, I highly recommend. It's delicious. We used them as messengers. And in fact, we decorated pigeons that served in war. Pigeons were used to carry messages. And one of my favorite things is that pigeons were the foundation of modern journalism.

32:33Kathy Corradi:Sorry?

32:34Bethany Brookshire:Yeah. How so? When the wire service Reuters started, it was not on a wire. It was on the wing. It was on the pigeon because Reuters figured out he could fly hot stock tips to and from Aachen and beat the train by two hours. And of course, we also use them for their poop because pigeon poop is excellent fertilizer and there's wonderful dove coats. You can still see some of them today developed by the ancient Persians that are these beautiful bell shapes so that all the poop falls to the bottom and you can scoop it.

33:09Kathy Corradi:Okay, so that history of pigeons is really interesting, but now pigeons, they're what, just another pest essentially?

33:16Bethany Brookshire:Yeah, there's a wonderful piece of work by Colin Jerelmack, who actually documented the fall of the pigeon in the public eye via articles in the New York Times over a century. And he was able to document that over about 100 years, pigeons went from noble, innocent, beautiful, to rats with wings. You know, we no longer needed fertilizer. We have chemical fertilizer. We don't need messengers anymore. We have email. And we don't need squab anymore. We have chicken.

33:49Kathy Corradi:How would you say that the history of the human-pigeon relationship compares with the history of the rat-human relationship?

33:57Bethany Brookshire:I would say the history of the human pigeon relationship differs in that we once had a use for the pigeon. I think of the pigeon as kind of the outdated cell phone of the animal world, right? We used to have such a use for them. And now we don't, and we can't fathom why they won't go away. It's so sad. Okay.

34:19Kathy Corradi:And if I were to ask you to summarize the downsides and the upsides of rats generally, how would you characterize that?

34:28Bethany Brookshire:Well, there are plenty of downsides associated with rats. People don't like them. They find them both physically and psychologically really stressful. People who live very closely with rats, it's awful. No one should have to live that way. Rats give people feelings of unsettledness, right? They are very associated with our feelings of disgust. And I'm saying that in terms of Western cultures, in terms of like the global north. Other cultures do not associate rats with disgust.

34:59Kathy Corradi:Give me an example of where rats are not thought of as disgusting.

35:02Bethany Brookshire:So the Temple of Karnimata, it's located in Deshnogye, India. This temple houses around 25 ,000 black rats. And those rats are considered sacred. They are holy. I got to speak to some of the people who help run the temple, who cook the food for the rats. It's a beautiful temple. It has solid silver doors carved with rats. There are beautiful marble floors for the rats. The rats drink from beautiful decorated bowls of milk, huge bowls of milk. They eat a wonderfully healthy diet. They get whole wheat, bread, whole bran. They get fruit, vegetables. And people come to make fire and food offerings to these rats.

35:50Bethany Brookshire:It's because the rats are not considered to be real rats. The rats are reincarnations of people. So the legend is that this woman, Karnimata, grew up in that area and she grew up to be a sage. She had mystical powers. And so when her sister's son passed away, he drowned while playing. Her sister brought her the boy and begged her to bring him back. and Karnimata interceded with Yama, the god of death. And Yama said, okay, the people from your family will no longer die. They will be reincarnated as rats. And then those rats, when they die, will again be reincarnated as people. And so now that temple, the family does still worship there, and it has been several hundred years, but other people, devotees worship there as well because they believe that they will also be blessed if they are devoted enough to be reincarnated as these rats.

36:53Kathy Corradi:What would you say are the drivers of the difference between one place or one culture and another, one in which the rat is looked at as just disgusting, a menace, dangerous, scary, et cetera, and one where it's not? What constitutes that difference, do you think?

37:09Bethany Brookshire:I would say there are a couple of things. There is one angle that's very cultural, right? I ended up interviewing for my book a bunch of people who worked in biblical scholarship. We ended up talking about translations and our understandings of things like Genesis. And God gave people dominion over the animals.

37:31Kathy Corradi:It's a big line, yeah.

37:32Bethany Brookshire:And that has become very deeply ingrained in many of our cultural ideas of what we should be able to control and how we should be able to control it. I would say that's one of the reasons that we hate these animals is because we expect animals around us to fail. We are prepared for that. We move into an area. We pave it over. We put up a Walmart, a Target, a Starbucks, a McDonald's, what have you. And we expect the animals to leave. And then we wring our hands. We are so upset. We have killed off this beautiful species. This species becomes beautiful. It becomes charismatic. It becomes this wonderful thing.

38:20Bethany Brookshire:And look at the horrible stuff we've done to it. But when an animal is still there, we're kind of mad. We don't like it. It's now where we've decided it doesn't belong, even if it always lived there. Now it's our space. You don't belong there anymore. And we get really upset, especially if the animals begin to thrive and especially if they thrive off things we value, right? Our gardens, our crops, our cats. We really hate them. We hate their success because their success feels like our failure.

39:02Kathy Corradi:To the animals that we call pests, what are humans? Are we just, you know, pests that text and build parking lots?

39:12Bethany Brookshire:That's actually something I got a lot when I was writing the book is it's humans. Humans are the real pests. We're the ones invading the world and taking it over and making it awful. I think that's too easy because it's the sort of thing that makes you fling up your hands and be like, oh, there's nothing I can do. We have choices in the way that we treat other animals and we have choices in the way we treat each other. And we don't need to live the way that we always have.

39:42Ed Glaeser:So I think it is certainly true that the innate human reaction to rats, I don't know why, is largely revulsion. That, again, is the economist Ed Glazer. Certainly when you see them in an urban context surrounded by trash, right? So you associate the rats with the filth, with drinking the water in the subway, right? It's hard not to think of that as being sort of awful.

40:03Kathy Corradi:Since rats are no longer a big disease vector, at least for now in most places, do you think our frightened view of them is simply outdated and that for the most part, rats are, yes, a negative externality of humans in cities, but a really minor one that we shouldn't worry so much about?

40:20Ed Glaeser:I think it's probably pretty small. That being said, I would still probably be in favor of policies that keep the rat population and manageable in the sense that who knows what happens if you let it get incredibly vast, who knows what new diseases occur or what spreads across things. So I think some control, but not making a fetish out of complete eradication.

40:38Kathy Corradi:So, Ed, let's play a quick game of word association. When I say rats, you say what? Cuddly. Come on now. You're just trying to make me happy now, aren't you?

40:49Ed Glaeser:You know, it's hard not to think that rats have gotten something of a bad rap. They certainly are not healthy to have in vast numbers around you. But, you know, it's a very urban species and I tend to like that. They sort of co-live with humans. They're, in some sense, our natural city partner.

41:05Kathy Corradi:I want to run past you at a couple of titles we're considering for the series. Let me know what you think. One is the exoneration of the rat. Too much?

41:14Ed Glaeser:It feels a little strong. It feels a little strong because it's not like this thing does not do anything. But something in that neighborhood sounds good.

41:22Kathy Corradi:Could I interest you in sympathy for the rat?

41:25Ed Glaeser:Yes. Yes, I love it. I love it. And the echo, of course, with the Rolling Stones is great.

41:31Kathy Corradi:Although the Rolling Stones' sympathy, this is sympathy for the devil. The devil is the narrator of that song. You know, I shouted out who killed the Kennedys when after all it was you and me. So it's not the purest sympathy, let's say. Do you still like this angle?

41:49Ed Glaeser:I do. I do. I think in general, having sympathy for a creature that, you know, coexisted with us, that suffers many of the same negative sides from cities as we do, that enjoys many of the same positive sides of cities that we do, the ability to create this ecosystem, I think that's a very worthy aim. And even if we do have to control the rat, not viewing it with so much horror, but rather viewing it as being, you know, our urban partner, seems like it makes more sense.

42:21Kathy Corradi:So, has New York City's war on rats led to any real change? Maybe. Last year, the Department of Sanitation reported a 20 % year-over-year decline in rat sightings. And Eric Adams' successor as mayor, Zoran Mamdani, is keeping the war going. He has a plan to achieve citywide trash containerization by the end of 2031. I hope you enjoyed this update from our archives. If you'd like to hear even more about rats, I have great news for you. This episode was part one of a three-part series. You can find the other episodes on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com slash rats. We will be back very soon with a brand new episode.

43:05Kathy Corradi:Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. This episode was produced and updated by Zach Lipinski with help from Dalvin Abouaji. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnston. Special thanks to Freakonomics Radio listener Jason Weeks for suggesting this topic. The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Ilaria Montenacourt, Jake Loomis, Mandy Gorenstein, Peter Madden, and Tao Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra.

43:41Kathy Corradi:As always, thank you for listening.

43:46Nils Stenseth:Whenever I do calls at home, my dog thinks it's an opportunity to voice his opinion as well.

43:56Bethany Brookshire:The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.

44:02Ed Glaeser:Tired of the same old game night? Switch things up with Chumba Casino.

44:08Kathy Corradi:Play over 200 free online social casino games, from classic slots and blackjack to exclusive in-house favorites you won't find anywhere else.

44:18Ed Glaeser:However long you got, you can play your way, anytime, anywhere. Make your next chill night a little more fun with Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group Voidware prohibited by logs. See terms and conditions for details. 21+.

44:33Kathy Corradi:Hey there, I'm Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio. If you love the podcasts in the Freakonomics Radio network, I want to tell you about a way you can get even more from us. To hear our shows without ads and get exclusive access to Freakonomics Radio bonus episodes, please subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts or sign up at SiriusXM.com slash podcasts plus. Start a free trial today.