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Earlier this week, Mayor Adams declared he won the war on rats after no evidence of vermin was found at a Brooklyn row house
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But can the rest be said the same for the rest of the Big Apple? I don't know about that
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Fox News' Richard Giacobis took a walking tour with the city's rat czar for an update on the ongoing war on rodents
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Right here we have a rat burrow. For the dozen or so folks on what seemed like a historic tour today through Columbus Park
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they learned a lot more than just the history of this park. The Norway rat requires one ounce of food a day to survive
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Instead, this group joined with the mayor's appointed rat czar calls an elite squad of anti-rat activists
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These are the newest members of the New York City Rat Pack. We want New Yorkers. We need New Yorkers thinking about this in a different way and joining us in collective action
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Kathy Karate is leading this new initiative across multiple rat mitigation zones in the city
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They're called rat walks where city officials educate the public about rats their behavior and how human actions contribute to their presence in the city
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A well stress rat is doing its best breeding Multiple litters healthy pups One example how the oil from a discarded empty bag of potato chips can allow a rat to thrive for more than a
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week. Extermination, it turns out, doesn't work. So it's public habits that allow rats to keep
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populating. Columbus Park in lower Manhattan is filled with rat-proof garbage cans, which
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karate says only work if New Yorkers get with the program. People would open it up, stick a pizza
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a box inside, no longer rat proof. But still, Karate says the new hands-on approach to rid
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the city of its rats is working, with rat sightings on the decline. We're seeing decreasing in rat
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sighting complaints, and more importantly, we're seeing increases in compliance. More properties
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are passing health department inspections in 2025 than they were in 2023. So if you want to join the
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rat pack, the city has scheduled a bunch of rat walks over the next few weeks throughout the five
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boroughs in specific rat mitigation zones. The goal is to take away the fascination and sometimes
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fear over rats and educate the public on how to deal with them because they still are here to stay
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We're in Lower Manhattan. Richard Giacobis, Fox 5 News
