I found a live rodent in my loo, so I joined New York’s Anti-Rat Pack

The militia musters under a tree at the eastern end of a Brooklyn park, late on a sunny afternoon, when the pathways are thick with ramblers and the scent of leaves and rotting rubbish.
We have come from all over the city. There’s a lady with tattoos on her arms and legs, there’s a man in a white collared shirt who looks as if he might play squash. There are three children who are not always paying attention.
All of us have volunteered to serve as citizen soldiers in the war New York is now waging against rats.
Recruits must undergo a three-pronged training programme, announced with great fanfare by Eric Adams, the mayor, last month. You must enroll in a “rat academy” class, you must volunteer for a “rat mitigation event”, and you must go on a rat walk: a sort of tour of the front line. These latter events are a hot ticket. The first couple I tried to sign up for were fully booked.
“I’ll give everyone a few more minutes,” said Kathy Corradi, the city’s director of rodent mitigation. She addresses a middle-aged black man, hovering nearby. “Are you joining us?”
“Oh no,” he says. “I just saw a bunch of white people under a tree; wondered what was going on.”
“Well!” cries one of the volunteers, a thin fellow with a goatee and sunglasses. “The jokes on you, man, because we’re going on a rat walk.”
Corradi moves on to a young mother, seated on a wall, a toddler at her side.
“A rat walk?” the lady cries. “Tell me more!”
By now there are about twenty of us under the tree. Corradi steps back into the circle and starts talking about the enemy. It is Rattus norvegicus. “Also known as the brown rat,” she says. “A rose by any other name. They evolved in eastern Asia, the Mongolia area. They evolved to burrow.”
She sets off along a walkway and we troop after her. The three children who were not paying attention run to the front and then dart off, at her direction, towards a shrubbery. I confess they are my children. The oldest, a gangly eleven-year-old, is soon shouting and waving a hand in the air.
“He’s discovered an earthen burrow,” says Corradi. “Rats prefer to burrow in healthy soil.” They find it in New York’s parks, she says. “Because they are a predatory species, they always have multiple ways in and out of their den.”
“This one has at least six,” my eldest shouts.
“Now,” Corradi says. “Has anyone heard of a rat coming out of a toilet? Urban myth or fact?”
I raise my hand and tell my comrades a story. Early one morning, a few weeks back, I stepped into my bathroom, lifted the lid and saw something brown floating in the bowl. One of my children had forgotten to flush, I thought. Then the thing began to move. I still have a vision of it thrashing about and then rising like a hairy salmon from the waters of my lavatory. It leapt clean out of the bowl and into the bathtub, its tail whipping about, its claws scratching the enamel.
I retreated. When I returned, armed with a broom, the rat seemed to have vanished. I wondered if it had jumped back into the lavatory, or better, if the whole thing was a hallucination. Then I found it behind the sink and managed to guide it out of the back door. It’s that kind of thing that makes you want to join the war on rats.
Corradi nods. Rats follow tree roots through the soil, she says. Sometimes these roots crack into a sewer. The rats use sewers “as a travel pathway,” she says. “That’s one way they can access buildings.”
She stops again beside an overflowing bin and points out some rat droppings in front of it. Behind are some larger ones, left by a dog. This “is a great food source for them,” she says, looking up at us. “Any thoughts?”
A young woman raises her hand and speaks for all of us. “Yucky,” she says.
We move on again past some handball courts where a bearded man in a vest greets us with a shout. He seems to think we are protesters. “Yeah!” he shouts. “Free Palestine.”
At a park entrance Corradi stops and points to the base of a brick wall. On our own properties we should keep a tally of holes larger than a quarter — or about an inch across — that a rat might penetrate, she says.
Some of this is lost in the telling on my two younger children, who begin haring up and down the street, looking for holes. The youngest, who is six, keeps coming back to tug on my shirt. “I found another hole,” he says. “Tell the lady.”
The middle child, who thought he was going on a rat hunt and wanted to bring his Nerf gun, finds an enormous stick and starts poking it into the holes. Then the two of them start filling the holes with stones and sticks and leaves.
Meanwhile, Corradi talks about rat killing. You can put dry ice in their burrows, she says. “I have worked with a lot of exterminators, who will take that shovel and go for it, but there are different levels of comfort.”
My eldest pipes up. “Why are we trying to get rid of the rats in the first place?” he asks. He obviously wasn’t listening to my lavatory story.
We can’t get rid of them altogether, Corradi says. But if their population explodes, “there is a price to that”. Bacteria in their urine causes illness and the rats themselves harbour all sorts of novel viruses. “We all just lived through a virus that jumped from an animal host to a human host.”
The comrade with the goatee approaches my eldest son as we march back into the park. “My problem is the rats get into my car,” he says. “They chew all the wires. I tried everything. After three years I had to start putting it in the garage.”
The walk finishes in the corner of the park where Corradi points out a rat “runway” that snakes through some spider grass. She fires some questions at us about where we think the rats are heading. We look out into the park, at the overflowing rubbish bins and all the people walking in the sunshine, as if they don’t even know there’s a war on.
A hand tugs at my shirt and there is my six-year-old staring up at me gravely. “Tell the lady,” he says. “I found another hole.”