Biting Back: This Upper West Sider Went to NYC’s Rat Academy; Here’s What I Learned

By Yvonne Vávra

I graduated from Rat Academy this week. With honors — which I’m awarding myself for surviving two straight hours of real talk about my greatest nemesis, complete with an endless torrent of PowerPoint slides showing rats having a blast.

Giant rats, baby rats, rats with teeth like elephant tusks, and a dead rat, too, who nonetheless still looked strangely pleased in its final repose, as though life had been good.

Attending Rat Academy, which is offered virtually or in-person all over the city, is the first step New Yorkers have to take to join the New York City Rat Pack. The free program is part of the Mayor’s efforts to enlist us in the “elite squad of dedicated anti-rat activists,” whether we’re a landlord, a community gardener, or a freaked-out local like me, ready to look their fear in the beady eye.

I signed up for the training after recently learning how rats have been closer to us than I could have imagined, even in my most horrified hours. I’m looking at you, Absolute Bagels. So rats have pre-tested our bagels, snacked on condiments, and sniffed their way around schmears, all under a roof where rat bodies were left to rot in traps.

Now I can’t help but wonder: how exactly did those offbeat flavors they were famous for come about? And let’s not even get into the situation at Barzini’s and their prospering rat family, which had already taken over the prosciutto boxes to raise generations of rodent success. I refuse to believe the Health Department has found just a few bad apples and that we can safely assume “everything bagels” everywhere are back to their original meaning.

Clearly, we need to become authorities ourselves.

As a proud Rat Academy alumna, I can report that rats like the smell of food and other rats, fancy candy wrappers to cover the entrances to their burrows, and gnaw through anything softer than steel, chiseling their way through sidewalks, walls, or cars at ten bites per second. I learned that they only need one single ounce of food per day to survive. I also learned that we should always wear shoes when taking out the garbage. Just passing this along, in case you wondered.

Much like other New Yorkers, rats aren’t into long commutes. Once they find a block with good food options nearby, they settle in and make it work. If that means they have to climb, dive, or swim, they James Bond it, and climb, dive, and swim.

“They’re good at everything,” raved our teacher Martha Vernazza from the Health Department. “But their superpower is their reproduction. That’s their big secret to success.” Brace yourself: Your average street rat lives for just twelve months, but a female can have four to seven litters during that year, with eight to twelve pups per litter, who themselves start procreating after just two months. The happier the rat, the more likely she is to produce that total of 84 offspring. This is our chance to jump in and reduce the number. By giving her reasons to worry about food and shelter, we make it harder for her to get in the mood. In Vernazza’s words: “We need to stress the pest.”

It’s indeed a we problem. Our rats — and they are our rats, since we’re the ones inviting them — bring us together; they’re the ultimate equalizer. They don’t care what we do with our lives, whether we’re living in a posh high-rise or a porous brownstone that’s seen better days. They like us for whatever we leave behind. The city’s Rat Information Portal provides rat inspection data that show exactly where Upper West Side rats live. Places with rat activity include luxury apartment buildings on Riverside Boulevard and NYCHA housing, residential and commercial buildings, both old and new, and the majority of playgrounds, schools, and parks.

The city has had considerable success in fighting rodents by containerizing trash, which has severely limited the rats’ all-you-can-eat buffet. Last year, the Upper West Side saw a 19 percent decrease in rat complaints compared to 2023. The City Council also passed a bill aiming to sterilize rats with birth control. “Flaco’s Law” is intended to protect the city’s wildlife and pets by targeting the rats’ fertility, rather than pumping poison at the problem.

But the city can’t do it alone, nor can restaurants or your super. We all need to “attack, attack, attack,” as DOH’s Martha Vernazza said. Take away their food, crush their burrows, clean, seal, and trap, don’t feed the birds, and maybe consult whoever takes care of the lower level of Riverside Park between 72nd and 79th Streets — the only section of the park recently inspected that’s rat-free.

It’s going to be a battle. The rats are New Yorkers to a T: quick to adapt, excellent at survival, and always ready to seize an opportunity. But while they’re probably always going to find their way into our delicious lives, we can fight for a way to coexist in a less stressful way — without them gnawing on our bagels, to begin with. Maybe we could even somehow harness their smarts and train them into contributing members of society — like scientists have already done with African giant pouched rats, who help authorities find smuggled items like rhino horns or detect landmines and tuberculosis.

As for me, I’ll have to retrain my algorithms, which, ever attentive to my every online move, misinterpreted my research for this article and are now flooding my social media feeds with crazy NYC rat stories. Otherwise, it’s time to sign up for steps two and three in becoming a New York City Rat Pack member: joining a “rat mitigation event” and going on a “Rat Walk.” I’m still nibbling away at the courage to take these next steps in my career.

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Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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