Tag: Manhattan

cat safety, environment, news, strays and ferals January 10, 2023

Can Cats Solve New York’s Rat Problem?

For the second time in seven months, one of New York Mayor Eric Adams’ own health inspectors has ticketed him for rat infestations at the Brooklyn brownstone he calls home.

Because it wouldn’t be New York without things turning into a circus, the man who unsuccessfully ran against Adams for the mayorship, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, took advantage of the mayor’s embarrassment by bringing two of his 16 18 cats to Adams’ block and holding a press conference on the sidewalk where he touted felines as the solution. (Adams, who is well known for his hatred of the rodents, famously held a “rat summit” at Brooklyn Borough Hall in 2019, “gleefully” showing off a new rat-killing contraption to reporters.)

Introducing reporters to his tuxedo, Tiny, and tabby cat, Thor, Sliwa said Adams was missing the most obvious solution to the rat problem — cats — and offered to become the city’s “rat czar” free of charge.

“Like most New Yorkers, [Adams] is frightened of rats,” Sliwa told reporters outside the mayor’s brownstone. “He’s tried everything but it’s time that we revert back to the best measure that has ever worked — and that’s cats.”

As we’ve noted before on PITB, Sliwa and his wife are dedicated cat servants, perhaps overly so. They currently house 18 cats in their Manhattan studio apartment, Sliwa said on his radio show this Sunday. Some of them are the couple’s pets and some are fosters for their rescue.

sliwacats — Nancy and Curtis Sliwa with one of their cats. Credit: Matthew McDermott

The rat problem in New York is real and, sadly, as bad as people make it out to be. You can hear them at night in many neighborhoods, and it’s not unusual to see them briefly caught in the glow of streetlights before scurrying into the shadows again.

I’ll never forget watching an entire conga line of them at the 125th St. subway platform. They just marched out of a hole in the twilight, each one bigger than the last, going about their business without any concern for what people might do to them.

And the answer, they know, is nothing. Because New York’s rats aren’t regular rats. They’re well-fed freaks, ballooning to enormous sizes thanks to the abundance of garbage cans to eat out of and the way garbage is collected in the city. Back in 2015, video of a rat dragging an entire slice of pizza down the steps to a Manhattan subway platform went viral, racking up more than 12 million views and earning the rodent the title Pizza Rat:

People who aren’t from New York and have never visited are probably shocked to see garbage piled high on the sidewalks of every street. New Yorkers are supposed to put the garbage out the night before pickup, but no one really observes that rule, and the mounds of trash grow for days before sanitation removes them. It’s a feast for the rats, and any solution has to start with cleaning up the garbage situation.

In the winter the cold weather prevents the contents of the trash from rotting, so the stink isn’t as bad, and sometimes the trash mountains are covered by snow.

But in the summer, when the tree-lined avenues get their green canopies and flowers bloom in window boxes, the city reeks. On hot days, the perfume of New York is rotting trash and the overwhelming smell of urine wafting up from the subways. Sometimes I think of what the Japanese, with their spotless streets and shiny subways, must think when they come to New York for the first time.

In October, after the city fielded a 71 percent increase in rat complaints over the previous year, the city introduced a new law making it illegal to put trash on the sidewalk before 8 pm ahead of pickup the following morning. The change hasn’t made a dent in the rodent problem.

ratssize — A 2015 study by Matt Combs of Fordham University documented the enormous size of New York City’s rats. Credit: Matt Combs

In any case, New York is not a good place for cats. Thankfully we have a huge and generally well-funded network of rescues that get kitties off the street and pulls cats and dogs from the city’s animal control system before they’re due to be euthanized, but strays who fall through the cracks don’t last long.

Indeed, when the New York Post talked to one of Mayor Adams’ neighbors shortly after Sliwa’s latest press event on Sunday afternoon, the woman said she’d like another cat to patrol the area around her building. The last one, she explained, had been run over by a car.

I don’t really expect anything to come of Sliwa’s plan to use cats in rat-infested locales. The red-bereted radio host is hawking the scheme because he likes to be a thorn in the mayor’s side, and because it generates free publicity, especially from the city’s tabloids and local news channels.

But if it ever comes to fruition, and people really expect strays to handle their rat problems, Sliwa and company better have a plan to keep the cats safe from traffic.

Buddy, cat photography, cat stories, Kittens August 1, 2022

Who’s That Handsome Kitten?

I was digging through some old files when I found these photos of a young Buddy the Cat:

handsomebuddy2 — “Hey, where’s that steak you promised?”

These were taken in my brother’s apartment on the Upper East Side. It was early summer, so Buddy was probably about four months old, give or take.

He spent almost the entire day in the yard where he made friends with Cosmo the Dog and had lots of fun chasing insects, running around and rolling in the grass. He made friends with every human there, of course. Then when he was tired out from all that playing, he had a super special treat: Steak from the BBQ.

I’d love to bring the little guy to more social events and barbecues, but alas, almost all of them involve dogs who are not Cosmo, and I’m not sure how Bud would do with three or four dogs running around, let alone 20+ people. Smaller gatherings sans pups are a better bet.

animals, cat behavior, cat indignities, Feline Weirdness, viral cat videos June 13, 2022

Got A Rat Problem? Get A Cat To…Befriend It And Groom It?

Cats and humans began their grand partnership some 10,000 years ago, when kitties handled humans’ pesky rodent problem and people repaid the felines with food, shelter and companionship.

Now the deal’s off, apparently.

Yesterday a Reddit user shared a video titled “When you get a cat hoping it will help you get rid of the big rat in your yard.”

The video shows the user’s new cat, a tortoiseshell/calico, “solving” the rat problem by befriending the rodent, playing with it and even grooming it.

The video has amassed almost 86,000 upvotes in 24 hours.

The odd friendship between feline and rodent is not without precedent. Studies have shown that cats are not effective rodent hunters in urban settings where rats have gone unchallenged for so long that they rival or exceed the size of most members of Felis catus.

In certain neighborhoods of New York City, for example, researchers observed cats essentially ignoring massive rats and in some cases eating trash side by side with them. The largest rats, apparently aware of the truce, are equally unconcerned by the presence of the cats. Other rats were more cautious around kitties.

The scene reminded me of the time my brother wanted me to bring Bud over to handle his rat problem. At the time he was living on 88th St. in Manhattan, less than a block from Gracie Mansion. His apartment had an unusual perk for Manhattan living — it was a spacious ground floor flat that opened up into a private, fenced-in backyard with grass and a few trees.

Mighty Bud — Tremble before him! Buddy the Mighty Slayer of Rodents!

In fact, it was one of the first places I took Buddy after adopting him. He was just a kitten, maybe 14 weeks old, and I brought him with me on a warm summer day when my brother had a few friends over for a barbecue.

Buddy made fast friends with my brother’s Chihuahua-terrier mix, Cosmo, and spent the day playing with his doggie cousin, frolicking in the grass and chasing bugs around the yard. Then he got a treat: Steak from the grill, chopped into tiny Buddy-size pieces.

Having a backyard in Manhattan was awesome, but there was a downside. At night the yard was like a stretch of highway for marauding rats who ran across it in numbers with impunity, probably en route to raiding the garbage bins of a bodega on the corner of 88th. The rats were so emboldened and so numerous, you could hear them scurrying across the yard at night.

My brother proposed bringing Buddy over and letting him loose in the yard after dark, letting his claws and predatorial instincts thin the rodential herd.

I declined, using the excuse that Bud could pick up diseases from going to war with the rats. That was true, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have come to that: At the first sign of those rats, Buddy would have run screaming!

(We don’t acknowledge that around him, of course. Officially, Buddy was not set loose upon the Manhattan rats because it would be grossly unfair to unleash such a meowscular, brave and battle-hardened feline warrior upon them.)

It’s one thing if Buddy won’t kill rats. He’s a wimp. But as the Reddit video illustrates, we are apparently closing the chapter on 10,000 glorious years of human-feline partnership, and officially entering the Era of Zero Reciprocity.

We do everything for our cats, and in return they nap, eat and allow us to serve them. From their point of view, it’s a fine deal.

Meowscular Buddy! — Just look at those meowscular guns and vicious claws!

Buddy, cat behavior, Uncategorized June 4, 2019

Six Trees

I’m here! Not much to show yet, as I didn’t quite nail the settings for properly shooting such a light-ambient city on my first night walk around Tokyo.

The immediate neighborhood is midway between Roppongi and Akasaka, not far from Tokyo Midtown. The word Roppongi means “six trees,” and the name dates back almost four centuries when the area was marked by half a dozen distinctive zelkova, also known as Japanese elm.

Here’s an aerial photo of the district:

As you can see, there’s a nice balance between green areas and urban density. Whereas New York has a very straightforward grid layout and you can get a feel for the dimensions of the city by looking down certain avenues running the length or width of the island, it’s easy to see why some people say Tokyo feels never-ending, one big sprawl of twisting streets, hills and alleys.

There’s also a verticality that gives it a different feel from American cities. Manhattan is famous for its urban “canyons,” but oftentimes there’s a clear demarcation between residential and commercial, both horizontally and vertically. Stores and restaurants are almost always on street level, while upper levels are either apartments or offices.

In this part of Tokyo the restaurants, shops, karaoke bars and movie theaters are just as likely to be on the 10th floor as the first, and the signs are often inscrutable even when they’re in English: A sign for one place, called Seven, includes no information about what kind of establishment it is beyond a cryptic piece of text that reads “I like when fight pure.”

Maybe it’s a boxing gym where they’re really sensitive about the rules. Or maybe it’s a bar where Japanese women mud-wrestle. Either one seems just as likely.

Below are some day shots, including a koi pond in the courtyard of my brother’s building. I’m not sure if Buddy would lick his lips or run in terror from these koi. They’re pretty big. And orange. And they jump! Any one of those things are enough to strike fear in the heart of the scaredy cat. Strange to think they can live as long as 35 years.

Meanwhile back in New York…

Looking at this photo, it almost seems like Buddy’s laying there dejected, thinking “Woe is me! Where has my Big Buddy gone? I am lost without him!”

Yet my mom reports Buddy waited for me and barely ate the first night, then by the second night he realized he’s still getting treated like a king, so he’s over it. The little jerk!