Once, in Malibu, I stepped on a dead rat in the middle of an Erewhon parking lot. Its little body was shriveled up, scorched by the Southern California sun and already mummified in the few hours since its death. It squelched under my foot. I screamed and jumped back, not only because stepping on a deceased rodent is disgusting, but because it is disgusting on a level which superimposes rational thought and touches some instinctual adversity to death. Dead equals gross. Dead rats are the grossest.
Except it wasn’t me who stepped on the rat but a classmate that I was with, and it wasn’t really an Erewhon parking lot but another grocery store of its ilk. Regardless, the point of all this isn’t about the truth-value of my storytelling nor the pesky details of who did the stepping — instead I wish to impress upon you the wrongness of seeing a deceased body in a place such as Malibu, where we don’t expect the illusion of beachtown paradise and unattainable celebrity to be shattered by the uncomfortable sight of dead rodents. In one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, nasty, dirty things have been willed out of existence behind the hubris of man’s belief that we can conquer nature.
Across the country, my recently established home of New York City presents an interesting contrast: It’s often marketed as a playground for the exorbitantly wealthy in an attempt to mask the inescapable mundanity of a city built with poor waste disposal and pest control measures, where vermin, pigeons, and cockroaches scuttle over even the wealthiest of facades.
Here’s a fun fact for you: the rats of uptown New York City and downtown are two genetically different species. Midtown (think Times Square and the Empire State Building) has a much slighter rat population, which presents a barrier to genetic mixing. A 2023 study estimates that there are approximately three million rats in New York, equal to nearly one-third of New York’s population.
However, despite their lofty population, rats exhibit the human-like tendency to not leave their neighborhoods. As a result of this lack of genetic mixing, the rats of uptown and downtown look different. The uptown rats are aggressive, large and in charge. The downtown rats are their smaller, cooler counterparts.
Midtown acts as a moderate barrier to the rat’s gene flow, perhaps because relatively fewer people actually live there. It’s a massive tourist hub and transportation center, but the lower human population leads to lower food waste and garbage production — though you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks that Times Square is necessarily cleaner than anywhere else in the city.
Rats, then, aren’t followers of garbage, but of people. Even though masses of people traverse Midtown every day, rats like to live where the people do. They’re a natural symptom of humanness, and our aversion to them and their mousey brethren reflects a never-ending cycle of shifting the blame for dirt and disease onto anything other than ourselves.
I’m sympathetic to rats. I wouldn’t go as far to say that I’m a rat advocate, but I’m an all-around animal lover. They didn’t ask to be here, and they are doing what we’re all doing: our very best to survive. We aren’t too dissimilar; after all, aren’t we all scrapping and biting and clawing for a way to survive in this overstimulating city?
“Rats, then, aren’t followers of garbage, but of people.”
I didn’t quite understand that girl’s reaction, that day in Malibu. Sure, I don’t think I would have been happy, either, discovering that the smushy thing I’m standing on isn’t a banana peel but instead a withered husk of a tiny body. I would prefer to not have a rat run over my foot, but seeing them out in the streets of Manhattan doesn’t bother me. I’m on my way to work — so are they. Their little bodies don’t take up all that much room: in my mind, they have the same right to be here as the rest of us do.
In Malibu, seeing a dead rat was so jolting because it felt out of place amongst the high-end vehicles and pristine backdrop of Zuma beach. In New York, it’s a little more complicated. New York is dirty. Massive amounts of waste are left everywhere, all the time, in plastic bags or just on the ground. The dissonance between rats drawn to New York garbage and the immense wealth that produces that waste is plainly visible — just look at the hedge fund-beneficiaries sharing a ride with Pizza Rat on the same Brooklyn-bound 6 train.
Despite all the money we throw at both exterminators and everything else in the city, rats just keep coming back. They’re a product of us, and even when all the humans are gone the rats will remain, skittering over the remnants of Fifth Avenue, looking for the noshable traces of us that we’ll inevitably leave behind. While I understand the extermination efforts as a measure to get the rat population under control, I can’t entirely justify them. The rat population reflects our own numbers; their existence is tied to our excess waste production. If we want to control the rat population, we need to stop pretending we can will them out of existence. Instead, we might take a closer look at our relationship to the planet and consumption behaviors, and try to interrogate the disconnect us city-dwellers have developed about where the source of the things we buy are, and where they go when we put them out on the street for mysterious collection.
As a bartender for the summer, I’m closer to being on nocturnal rat-time than normal, city-person time. (Although, it’s New York. Is there a “normal person” time?) When I leave work, a rat might actually run over my foot on its way to make it in time for its own shift at the rat bar. We’re not too different, these rats and I. Like it or not, if I’m sharing my commute with a four-legged friend, I’ll continue to make room on the sidewalk. They don’t take up much space.
Arianna Kaplan ’27 is a recent transplant to Manhattan after a decade of living NYC-adjacent, and is determined to find every hidden gem of the city before she leaves. She doesn’t really like bagels or care all that much about the Knicks, but still fervently believes that New York is the greatest city in the world.
Social Tease: In New York, rats are everywhere. In Malibu, not so much. Why is it that we are so viscerally disgusted by rats, so instinctively opposed to their presence? Columnist Arianna Kaplan ’27 investigates the dynamics of rat-hood in her new home of New York City, searching for an explanation to our widespread aversion to rodents.
“Despite all the money we throw at both exterminators and everything else in the city, rats just keep coming back,” Kaplan writes. “They’re a product of us, and even when all the humans are gone the rats will remain, skittering over the remnants of Fifth Avenue, looking for the noshable traces of us that we’ll inevitably leave behind.”
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