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New York Sign Language

Rats! NY's No.1 Pest

By BOB YAMPOLSKY


ネズミに悩むニューヨーク

犯罪率が減少傾向にあるニューヨークで今、人々を悩ませ、恐怖に陥れるものは、なんとネズミやゴキブリなどの害虫だ。市や民間業者が必死になってその駆除に乗り出しているが、果たして効果は出ているのだろうか?

When I came back from the grocery store the other day, I noticed something wrong with the package of bread I had bought. There were two little holes in the wrapper, and just where the holes were the bread was torn. I looked closer: Tooth marks? Rats. So I took the bread and my receipt back to the store, found the manager and began my explanation. "I bought this bread, you see, and ...."

He cut me off, saying, "Sorry. Please, take another package," before the other customers could hear. Even without hearing me out, he knew what the problem was meaning that this sort of thing is not at all rare.

An estimated 28 million rats live in New York City, which makes for four rats for every person. Like crime and crummy subways, rats have been a part of New York for so long that people assume the rats will be here forever. But crime is down and the subways are better. Is it possible our rat plague will end too?

Our mayor, with his Comprehensive Rodent Control Initiative, is trying to do just that. And that is why signs saying, "CAUTION: RAT POISON HAS BEEN PLACED IN THIS AREA," are up all across the city. The one shown above is in a park and thus comes with added warnings: "Please keep all dogs on leash. Please watch all children at play." It's hard to imagine that the mayor will succeed. Every day I watch big slinky rats slip around the subway tracks, just under such signs. But he has gotten the city's attention. New York Magazine even has a column called "Rat City" covering his war on vermin.

Since we are on this topic anyway, we might as well look at New York's other great native pest, the roach. Who knows how many billions or trillions of them live in the city?

Here, let us look at this billboard for a product called Combat. (Anti-roach products have distinctly martial names: Combat, Raid, Black Flag. The exception is the Roach Motel, with its memorable copy line, "Roaches check in, but they don't check out.") "Big Roach Problem?" it asks, showing a picture of a very big roach. There is a bit of deliberate ambiguity in this phrase: Namely, does the adjective big modify roach or problem? (This is a frequent issue in advertising: Car ads talk of rear leg room, but how many of us have rear legs? And the milk carton in my refrigerator proclaims itself to be Real Cows' Milk; this is good, for I would hate to have my kids drink milk coming from fake cows. But I digress.)

New York roaches are not big roaches, like those frightening things that appear in Japan. They are small, less than two centimeters long when full grown. But they swarm. So it is the problem that is big. We have all heard how, were there to be a nuclear holocaust, it is the roaches that would survive. And New York would doubtless be their capital. The mayor has announced no initiative on roaches, and none is expected.If we had to name the third great pest of New York, it would be the poor, dumb pigeons. "Rats with wings," they are called, not altogether fairly. They are, after all, a type of dove, the symbol of peace, and they fly gracefully and athletically. Many normal people find solace and companionship in feeding them bread crumbs. But they befoul windowsills, gurgle noisily and are just somehow annoying, and thus have their bitter enemies. One of them, a university professor, went around poisoning them last year. The main outcry over her actions was not that pigeons were dying, but that innocent sparrows were.

My own personal pest horror story goes back to the time I lived in an apartment in Queens. We would put out roach motels, they would become full and then, mysteriously, empty again. The mystery was solved one evening when we found a mouse in the motel: It had come to eat the trapped roaches and got trapped itself. I have not lived in Queens since, and, I am happy to report, our current Manhattan apartment has neither roaches nor rats nor pigeons on our windowsills. We do have ants, though, but to a city boy like me they are almost a novelty not so much pests as a natural phenomenon. I like to watch them as they move in their neat little lines, before I take out the spray and kill them.


Shukan ST: Feb. 27, 1998

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