Hacker News Reader

Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

I live in the country. I have huge wild native gardens. I also have dozens of snakes, foxes, and raptors that patrol those gardens.

When you mix the fecundity of urban life with these types of areas, eventually you either have massive rat problems or massive "raptors that ate rat poison" problems. We are lobbying our town to ban the use of these poisons by the town, but without them the growing number of community gardens would simply become havens for rats, especially as having free ranging cats becomes more frowned upon.

View on HN

I think the rat problem is actually pretty manageable with proper standards of how trash is stored, and the use of Jack Russell Terriers. The lack of political will to put up with the mild inconvenience of the former and the brutality of the latter mean poison is chosen instead.

Unless you have a wild population of rat-dogs they'll never catch enough rats to make a dent in the rat population, and the lack of political will to put up with the occasional poisoned Jack Russell Terrier (or the quite frequent poisoned bird of prey) means that securing trash is the only method that works.

You can get pretty far with trapping. Various localities do it effectively in New Zealand. However it tends to be on islands, peninsulas or pest proofed reserves.

Doing it for a town would seem difficult.

I'd love to see a study on the topic, it doesn't seem totally obvious that depaving an area would increase a rat population, but maybe I'm wrong

I read a book titled "Rats" once, which was a journalist embedding with the rats of New York, Walden-style, and watching their habits over a year, talking to rat catchers and so on. My general impression is that populations are controlled by available food for rats, and nothing else. Also, rats aren't so bad.

Yeah, e.g. nyc has plenty of rats and little of these grassy areas like pictured in the artixle. It's just because of the trash above ground, and food garbage in sewers. I live in suburban area with plenty of grass, trees.. no rats because of good trash pickup. I really don't think these depaving efforts will cause real vermin issues.

> Also, rats aren't so bad.

If you’re blessed (cursed?) with a population that consists of a large number of ground dwelling birds, rats are the enemy. I’m in New Zealand.

IIRC in New York when COVID happened, the rat population ended up in severe pressure due to lockdowns eliminating virtually all sidewalk and subway food trash overnight, and ended up selecting for the most aggressive rats to survive.

New York has coyotes and falcons and no one bats an eye.

Seattle is also covered in coyotes, birds of prey, and rats.

I've seen coyotes in Boston and neighboring Cambridge has wild turkeys roaming the streets.

If you're talking about NYC, where do we have coyotes?

Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan. https://www.nyc.gov/site/wildlifenyc/animals/coyotes.page

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/meet-the-coywolf-field-video...

Coywolf aka Eastern Coyote in it's NYC habitat.

Sorry, what?

This seems a valid concern to me. I am on the edge of a city, on one side there are endless buildings, and on the other side it's a big open park with some farmland. It's still technically in the city, so there are no stray rats as the city euthanizes them frequently, and there are rats everywhere. My house is full of holes, and they have dozens of ways to come in. I see them frequently.

Of course, neighbors have started using more and more rat poison, so sometimes I do see some rats dead on the ground, rotting in the sun. And recently, I've started seeing dead raptors in the farmland close to us.

Have you seen the novel rat trap from New Zealand? No poison. Uses bait and then de-brain's any rat that enters trap. Rat drops out, to be consumed by other critters. IIRC Each trap kills a few hundred before needing a new CO2 cartridge.

Last I read, it's been very effective.

This little beastie I assume? https://goodnature.co.nz/

The fancy one that gives a kill count is quite appealing.

The more traditional DOC 150/200/250 are a good option too. They are powerful, don’t mess about with them.

https://predatorfreenz.org/toolkits/trapping-baiting-toolkit...

I was not prepared for the smartphone app with kill notifications

Nicely spotted.

They've much refined the design and their product line. Also now avail in the US. Yay!

Raptors in this case are a kind of bird.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com