Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has a message for the rats overrunning the City of Light: Why can’t we be friends?
After years spent battling vermin, this week Hidalgo’s administration announced it intends to take a different approach and attempt to achieve a more peaceful state of coexistence with the rodents.
“With guidance from the mayor, we have decided to form a committee on the question of cohabitation,” announced Anne Souyris, the city’s deputy mayor for public health, during Thursday’s meeting of the Council of Paris. She added that the group would be tasked with finding the method of dealing with the rats that proved to be both “effective” and “not unbearable” for Parisians.
The announcement implies a departure from the city’s 2017 anti-rat plan, a €1.7 million strategy that involved the installation of airtight trash bins throughout the city and extensive use of rat poison in thousands of aggressive extermination operations.
Souyris’ announcement was met with heckles from politicians like Geoffroy Boulard, mayor of the city’s 17th Arrondissement, who has repeatedly expressed concerns over the “proliferation of rats” in the city.
“Anne Hidalgo’s team never disappoints,” tweeted Boulard, expressing incredulity over the soft-handed approach to the rodent problem. “Paris deserves better.”
But animal rights associations like Paris Animals Zoopolis hailed the city’s bet on more cordial relations with the city’s rodent population.
“Current methods are ineffective and cruel,” the group tweeted. “Setting up a [working group] to think about and experiment with new methods is essential; we support alternatives other than pest control.”
Czars and ferrets
Paris has always had an intense relationship with its rat-habitants.
The rodents were responsible for the proliferation of the bubonic plague that wiped out nearly half the city’s population in the 14th century, but those same rats were a godsend during the 1870-71 Siege of Paris, during which they became a key food staple for starving inhabitants.
Although the city’s population of six million rats has remained relatively stable in recent years, trash strikes this spring prompted fears that the rodents might become emboldened and claim greater dominance over the the French capital.
Paris is by no means unique when it comes to rats and other cities have adopted varied measures to keep populations under control.
Earlier this year New York hired its first-ever rat czar and allocated $3.5 million for a rodent “exclusion zone” covering the northern half of Manhattan. The city is betting on a combined strategy of sanitary inspections, traps and building renovations to tackle the rodent problem in neighborhoods like Harlem.
Other cities have sought aggressive, but eco-safe approaches to the problem.
In 2021 the French city of Toulouse began using ferrets to shut down rat colonies in public spaces.
“Traps are placed at the burrow exits and up to three ferrets are released to flush the rats out,” said Françoise Ampoulange, the municipal counselor in charge of animal welfare in Toulouse. “Traditional traps generally only catch younger rats, but this system is successful at catching the ‘alpha’ couples that produce the colony’s litters.”
The strategy is a useful alternative to conventional systems, given there are strict rules on the use of poisons, Ampoulange said. The rats caught by the ferrets are then euthanized with gas.
The rising temperatures linked to climate change are expected to make cities even more attractive to pests like rats in coming years, fostering the conditions for rodents to breed year-round.
With the odds stacked against them, it’s likely Paris won’t be the only city to surrender to the inevitable: It’s the rats’ world and we just live in it.
