Should we be following New York's cunning rodent control plan – and getting rats drunk?
Since moving to Oxford two weeks ago, I have swum in the Thames every day and not seen a single rat. Several cows, a shivering hen party, plenty of empty bottles and a particularly ugly pair of knickers caught on a weeping willow, but no rats. Within seven minutes of arriving back in London last night, a rat the approximate size and shape of an alsatian had run across my path, narrowly swerved my son’s buggy and dived head-first into a bush. The noise I made was not unlike that of the Victoria line passing through a Tube tunnel at full speed, with a drinks can trapped beneath its wheels.
So it was with some delight I read that New York has decided to simply make its rats drink themselves to death. The Ekomille – the invention designed for this unpleasant bit of Pied Pipering – looks like a Soviet-era alarm clock but
apparently this battery-operated ma
chine attracts rats with bait, which trig
gers a trap door and drops the unlucky rodent into a pool of alcoholbased liquid. The tray can – please hold me – hold “80 rat carcasses”.
We may not have reached the sheer, sewage-flavoured, bin-raiding, bald-tailed, up-a-drain rat crisis complained about by most New Yorkers, but most large British cities have their very own rat problems. I still remember the quiet, haunted voice of a Liverpudlian friend who, after ill-advisedly stepping into the alleyway behind her backyard at dusk, rang me to say that some of her rodent visitors were “the size of dogs. And laughing.”
Drowning in cheap alcohol in dark, cramped conditions surrounded by hairy strangers sounds the perfect sendoff for a London rat: like post-work drinks in the City. Bring the Ekomille here by all means. But what would happen to the slopping, 70% ABV remains? I know of a riverside workplace by Westminster Bridge I wouldn’t mind delivering them to …