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Syracuse’s metropolitan area was in the top 50 cities for the number of rodent treatments from 2021 to 2022, according to a list that Orkin, a pest control service, released on Oct. 17. Syracuse has ranked on the list six consecutive times starting in 2017.

“Rodent infestations are among the top pest issues of the fall and winter seasons,” wrote researcher Ben Hottel in Orkin’s press release. “Not only are mice and rats a nuisance, but they are known to spread a variety of dangerous diseases, including Salmonella and Hantavirus.”

Orkin lists Syracuse 42nd this year, the lowest position since 2019 when Syracuse came in 39th. Other New York cities on the list this year include Buffalo, which placed 39th, and Albany, which placed 34th. New York City had the highest number of rodent treatments in the state and the second highest in the United States, just behind Chicago. Experts in rat populations said cities are a perfect breeding ground for rodents.

“Rats thrive in cities because there is an abundance of resources available to them,” wrote Kaylee Byers, the Deputy Director of the Wildlife Health Cooperative of British Columbia, in an email to The Daily Orange. “This is ample food, from restaurants to home waste in alleys to backyard gardens.”

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Dawn Biehler, a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and author of “Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches and Rats,” said housing also contributes to growth of rat populations.

“American society and its system of government is not very good at maintaining the quality of housing over time,” Biehler said. “Housing, like any other physical object, decays over time.”

She said decaying buildings can be an ideal habitat for rats. Byers said rats are particularly adaptable to urban environments because they are omnivorous with a versatile diet and need little space to make a burrow.

“I’ve found rat burrows next to telephone poles, where the only evidence was a crack in the cement,” Byers wrote in her email.

Orkin wrote in the release that it constructed the list not by analyzing the number of new rodent treatments it performed in each city’s metropolitan area over the course of Sept. 1 2021 to Aug. 31 2022. Byers said people should not take Orkin’s methodology as the whole truth.

The “rattiest city” ranking is based on anecdotal data and has biases in its methodology, she said. She said it’s likely many people who encounter rats in either a residential or commercial space don’t choose to report them to the government or to a private company like Orkin. Still, Byers said the data has value.

“We really don’t know how many rats are in our cities,” she wrote. “To know how many rats there are, we need to go out and count them, systematically throughout a city.”

With high rat populations in cities like NYC and Syracuse, city governments are looking for solutions. On Oct. 18, NYC Mayor Eric Adams and NYC Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced a plan revising the city’s garbage collection policies.

Byers emphasized that some methods of reducing rats can have negative environmental impacts. The use of rodenticides can poison other animals if they eat the rat after it dies. British Columbia has issued a temporary ban on rodenticides in order to better understand their ecological impacts, she said.

Both Byers and Biehler agreed that humans have exacerbated rat presence in cities, from providing them a large amount of food to creating habitats in abandoned properties.

“I don’t blame the rats. I blame the system that they’re in. I don’t necessarily see rats as bad animals,” Biehler said. “They’re a symptom of what we’ve got as a society.”

Published on October 26, 2022 at 10:46 pm

Contact Kyle: kschouin@syr.edu | @Kyle_Chouinard