The number of rodents is increasing in the country's capital, and it's not just in the corridors of power.
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Rats are infesting our nation’s capital, and that’s not just a Trump-madness-type exaggeration. We’re talking real rats — the filthy rodents that progressive Democrats and MAGA Republicans are working to exterminate as efficiently as possible.
“The city’s rat population is growing rapidly,” the Washington Post reports, with D.C. leading the pack, as it does in so many other aspects of modern life, with San Francisco and New York City lagging far behind.
According to the Post, cities “struggle to control the destructive pests, which carry diseases, contaminate food supplies with urine and feces, bite people and pets, damage wiring in homes and cars, and cause about $27 billion in damage a year in the United States alone.”
Over the past decade, the rat population in D.C. has increased by more than 300 percent, and the reason for this population explosion, if you haven’t guessed yet, is global warming, or as we should now say, climate change. A study in the journal Science Advances found that 40 percent of the rat population growth can be attributed to rising urban temperatures, and “the more densely populated a city is and the less green space it has, the more urban rats thrive,” as the Post reports.
Fortunately, our more well-to-do cities have already found solutions to the problem. Again from the Post: “In D.C., there’s a ‘rat academy’ where property managers and private exterminators are trained to identify and eradicate infestations, while dog-owner groups are using terriers to fight rats. New York City [has hired] a ‘rat king’ for a pilot project to place trash in containers so rodents can’t get to it.”
For now, however, the rats are winning, although how quickly they will finally win is impossible to predict. “It’s hard to even estimate the scale of the problem, since conducting a census of the nocturnal animals that lurk in sewers and alleys is a complex task,” reports the Post, whose grim tone suggests that capitulation may be imminent.
Wait a minute. All of this worry may be a bit premature, if not misguided. Perhaps we are getting it all wrong. After all, we have been told for decades that the problem is humanity, not the animals whose habitats we are so mercilessly destroying.
We all remember what the late Prince Philip wrote in the foreword to his 1986 book, Humans as Animals. The Duke of Edinburgh, whose concern for the planet was well known, said he had sometimes wondered what it would be like to be an animal “whose species had been so reduced in numbers that they were in danger of extinction. How he felt about the human species, whose rapid increase in numbers had made it impossible for them to exist anywhere.” Given this, he was “tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.”
So maybe, just maybe, it's high time for the rats to win, and it's surprising that our leading environmentalists haven't voiced that view yet.
Washington's population increased by more than 100,000 people from 2000 to 2020, and then fell by another 60,000 due to the pandemic. So we can look at the pandemic in a more positive light, in terms of its impact on human and rat populations.
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