It’s a rat scare in New York, where the sightings in the city of rats have increased by 71%according to data from the Department of Urban Cleaning, since October 2021. This prompted the mayor ex-policeman, Eric Adams, to mobilize – “because there is nothing I hate more than rats“, he wrote on Twitter – posting a call for of “director of rodent mitigation”, more politically correct version of super exterminator.
“If you have the grit, determination, and killer instincts necessary to fight off New York’s relentless rat population, then your dream job awaits you,” tweeted the mayor again who, half-jokingly, inserts between the requirements “a swashbuckling attitude, original humor and a generally badass air”. The promised salary is respectable: between 120,000 and 170,000 dollars.
But, it is warned, it is not a job for the squeamish, the ‘rat czar’, as the new official is also ironically defined, will have to be able to use “directly techniques to exterminate rodents with authority and efficiency”. In short, the city of New York – which with its 8 million inhabitants has approx 2 million mice — is on a war footing, as city council member Shaun Abreu explained at a press conference last month: “This is not Ratatouille. Rats are not our friends.”
