NEW YORK, NY Dec. 20 (DPI) – The NYT came out last week with an increasingly rare local story, one about the exploding rat population in the city and the latest efforts to stem it.

According to the report, one solution – new to the NYT and perhaps some New Yorkers – has been to bait bucket traps with Oreo cookies. The bucket traps are filled with a blue alcohol solution, which drowns the rats.

The New York City rat population is believed to be about 2 million, less than the human population of about 8 million, but enough to pose a serious potential health problem. Thus the effort to eradicate the rat population is ongoing, in NYC and every city.

But for whatever reason the reporter called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which produced this statement for the NYT:

PETA prefers rodent control that focuses on garbage cleanup and sealing entry points, “not finding new ways to torment and kill small animals who are simply trying to live their lives, just like any other New Yorker.”

Fortunately the NYT allowed for reader comments, and the most popular of more than 850 comments zeroed in on what many saw as an amusingly naive and unnecessary counterpoint.

The most popular comments focusing on the rat quote:

Rats “…are simply trying to live their lives, just like any other New Yorker,” says PETA. You can’t make this stuff up.

PETA’s comment is ridiculous. I’m all for protecting animals from abuse but it’s apparent PETA is not aware that rats can carry diseases that can infect humans and other creatures.

Maybe PETA volunteers should collect the rats and bring them home “to live their lives like any New Yorker”.

If you’ve ever had a rat infestation in your own home, you know how quickly those PETA talking points become irrelevant, even if you’re sympathetic. It’s not about food or garbage “left out”– they chew into your cupboards, come in through the pipe holes under your sinks, chew in through the vents you have to have in your roof, chew in through any container that’s not made of glass or steel, even climb in through the sewer pipes, I’m told… You only learn where your own home is vulnerable after they are already in. Traps don’t work fast enough. Leave a pair of rats alive by being patient with your traps and they will have an intergenerational pack urinating and defecating on everything you love by the end of the month.

We can build traps until the cows come home. We can spread poison all over the place with all its collateral damage. We can import ten thousand feral cats. We can bring in rat birth control by the boatloads…but nothing is going to work as long as we keep feeding the rats mounds and mounds of trash. We have piles and piles of food refuse in plastic bags sitting along our sidewalks every day. As long as we keep doing THAT, we will have rats galore and all kinds of other hygienic problems. We have met the enemy and it is us.