Brooklyn Rats BROOKLYN-USA.ORG
Borough President Adams got help demonstrating Rat Trap’s rodent-killing contraption at Borough Hall in September Borough President’s Offi ce/Erica Krodman
Adams unveils new rat trap as a solution
to the Five Boroughs’ rodent crisis.
You won’t smell a rat!
Borough President Eric Adams
showed off dozens of dead
rats to media assembled outside
Borough Hall on Thursday, September
5th, as a demonstration of new
rat trapping technology, which can
store rodent carcasses for months —
without causing a stink!
“It drops them into the bottom and
they’re contained in there, there’s
no scent, there’s no smell, there’s no
decaying, there’s no spread of bacteria,”
said exterminator Anthony Giaquinto,
who joined Adams for the
press conference on Sept. 5.
The metal contraption, created by
the pest control company Rat Trap,
lures rodents with sunflower seeds
and nuts, before dropping them into
the box’s alcoholic solution, which
intoxicates the rats, eventually
knocking them out and drowning
14 ONE BROOKLYN | FALL 2019
them, according to Giaquinto, who
works for Rat Trap.
“It’s quick!” exclaimed Giaquinto.
Adams claims that the boozed-up
rats drown after about three minutes,
and demonstrated that the trap
could hold more than a dozen dead
rodents at a time.
Beyond giving the rats a tipsy
farewell, the trap’s alcoholic solution
prevents their carcasses from
smelling, making the trap preferable
for einclosed spaces, and attracting
more beady-eyed pests, since
rats don’t approach areas where
they smell other dead rodents, Adams
explained.
“Rats don’t go to a place where
they smell dead rats. So when you
use the rat candy that the city uses,
once a rat dies, other rats won’t go
there,” Adams said.
The borough president’s announcement
comes after a surge of
rat sightings in Brooklyn. According
to a recent report, anywhere
between 250,000 to millions of rats
live in the city, and Brooklyn houses
more rodents than any other borough.
In 2018, Brooklynites logged
more than 6,500 rat complaints to
the city’s 311 complaint hotline,
dwarfing runner-up Manhattan’s
4,300 complaints.
Sanitations officials have repeatedly
tried to mitigate the infestation
crisis, shelling out $5.3 million dollars
for mint-scented garbage bags
that supposedly deterred the vermin,
and releasing a $32 million war on
rats in 2017 — both of which failed to
shrink the number of pests.
At the press conference, Adams
assailed the city’s failed extermination
efforts in claiming officials
should adopt his new rat killing
tech.
“Something is wrong when we
continue to throw money away on
something that isn’t successful,”
Adams said, adding that the new devices
only cost between $300 and $400
a piece, including maintenance.
And, while Adams noted that
the city has no plans to continue
installing Rat Traps, he hopes to
use discretionary funds to expand
the program around Borough Hall,
speak to the health officials and
city council members about implementing
the devices, and launch
two more pilot programs at a public
housing development and in Bedford
Stuyvesant.
“Our goal here at Borough Hall
is to really look at the problem and
come up with solutions, and we believe
wefound just that,” he said.
/BROOKLYN-USA.ORG