New York City announced Wednesday the appointment of its first “director of the rodent abatement program,” a city department dedicated to killing millions of rats in the American city.
Kathleen Corradi’s appointment comes four months after the city posted a job ad saying it was looking for a “bloodthirsty” leader.
According to an urban legend, in New York there are as many rats as inhabitants: almost nine million. The famous English novelist Charles Dickens complained about it when he visited the city in 1842.
It is common to see rodents in the streets, on the subway platforms or in the litter bins of the “city that never sleeps”. In fact, a rat became popular online in 2015 when a video showed it running down the stairs of a subway station with a whole slice of pizza in its mouth.
“New York may be famous for ‘Pizza Rat,’ but rats and the conditions that help them spread will no longer be tolerated: no more dirty sidewalks, abandoned spaces and burrows,” Kathleen Corradi said in a statement.
The former professor and waste management expert will earn $155,000 a year, according to the ‘New York Times’. When the job posting was posted, Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer who wants to fight the city’s pests, said, “There’s nothing I hate more than rats.”
The “ideal candidate” for the job offer had to be “ultra-motivated, quite bloodthirsty, and determined to look at all solutions from various angles,” but also have “determination and killer instincts” for “large-scale killing.” Of pests.
The city, which invests millions of dollars in this matter, regularly tests new techniques to eradicate rats, such as dry ice or alcohol baths. And a Manhattan neighborhood association called R.A.T.S regularly organizes dog hunts to kill as many rats as possible.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
