Shocking but true: It's been just one week, one week exactly, since Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams debuted his pioneering rat extermination plan. Surely you have not managed to wipe the rat ladle from your mind, nor eradicate the mental image of so many bloated rodent corpses drowned in a vat of chemical brine. But if you had, well... there it is again! A dunk tank full of alcohol and vinegar and dozens of long-dead rats, here to haunt you until you too succumb to the freakish soup.
It was a disgusting demonstration, and according to some critics, hyperbolically so — a gross-out stunt, pest control run off the rails and into the realm of animal cruelty. Voters for Animal Rights, for example, called Adams's visceral display "sadistic" and "barbaric." This very website described the rat trap press conference as a "morbid spectacle," vividly recalled the nauseating plop of waterlogged rat body atop waterlogged rat body, dredged from a watery grave and piled into a trash bag.
Faced with backlash over this effective-if-gruesome execution method, does Adams have regrets? Hell no! As a guest on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show on Thursday, Adams faced the controversy head-on. Touting his personal history of animal rights advocacy — that time in 2010 when he, as a state senator, took part in a Prospect Park vigil for slaughtered geese; his work to slash the city's meat consumption — he insisted that the contentious traps were a necessary first step in addressing an immediate crisis.
Poison takes time, and can endanger children and pets along with household rodents, he emphasized. While more aggressive sanitation methods will be needed longterm, the rat problem demands immediate solutions. "I have mothers in my office who talk about waking up ... and seeing rats gnawing on their babies, because of dried milk," Adams told Lehrer.
That concern has been repeatedly echoed by NYCHA residents inside and outside Adams' borough: Emboldened, aggressive rats menacing the people whose homes they've taken over. Citing a team of plumbers who, according to Adams, recently removed 40 bags of rats from a Brooklyn public housing development, he urged listeners to consider the issue in terms of a crisis, the full scope of which New Yorkers living in more affluent areas might not appreciate. The ability to talk about rat welfare is a "luxury" in and of itself, Adams stressed, when disease-spreading rodents threaten your basic need for domestic safety.
"Families are traumatized," he added. "We can never put rats over children, and I am not going to do that. My personal beliefs on animal wellness are not going to get in the way of my role as Borough President."
Adams supports sterilization, he said, and more trashcans on more street corners, but also systematic rat drowning. Non, je ne regrette rien:
