The Washington Rat-Race
Rodents are on the rise in the nation’s capital—and not just in the halls of power.
Rats are taking over our nation’s capital, and this is not mere Trump Derangement Syndrome hyperbole. We’re talking real rats—the filthy kind that progressive Democrats as well as MAGA Republicans would like to see exterminated as efficiently as possible.
“Urban rat populations are booming,” the Washington Post reports, with the District of Columbia leading the way, as it does in so many areas of modern life. San Francisco and New York are far behind.
Cities are “struggling to deal with the destructive pests, which spread disease, contaminate food with urine and feces, bite people and pets, chew through wiring in homes and cars, and cause an estimated $27 billion in damages a year in the United States alone,” according to the Post.
Over the past decade, rat sightings in DC jumped by more than 300 percent, and the cause of this population explosion, if you haven’t already guessed, is global warming or, as we are now expected to say, climate change. A study in the journal Science Advances finds that 40 percent of the spike in rat sightings can be traced to rising temperatures in cities, and “the more densely populated a city is, and the less green space it has, the more urban rats thrived,” as the Post puts it.
Thankfully, our best-run cities are already on top of the problem. Here, again, the Post: “DC has a ‘rat academy’ to train property managers and private exterminators to spot and attack infestations while rogue groups of dog owners root out rats with terriers. New York [has] hired a ‘rat czar’ to pilot a plan for securing trash in bins, where rodents can’t get it.”
For now, however, the rats are winning, though how quickly they will claim total victory is impossible to predict. “It is hard to even know the scale of the problem because doing a census on an animal that is nocturnal and hides in sewers and alleys is difficult,” according to the Post, whose glum tone suggests that surrender might be imminent.
Now, wait a minute. All this hand-wringing might be a little premature, if not misguided. Maybe we have got this whole thing bass-ackwards. For decades, after all, we have been made to understand that mankind is the problem, not the animals whose natural environments we so ruthlessly destroy.
We all remember what the late Prince Philip wrote in the preface to a 1986 book, People as Animals. The Duke of Edinburgh, whose concern for the planet was well known, said he sometimes wondered what it must be like to be an animal “whose species had been so reduced in numbers that it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist.” With that in mind, he was “tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.”
So maybe—just maybe—it is high time the rats won, and it is surprising that our leading environmentalists have not yet made this point.
The human population in Washington grew by more than 100,000 from 2000 to 2020, then dropped back another 60,000 thanks to the pandemic. So we might regard the pandemic in a more favorable light, in its effect on the human population—and that of rats.
Progressives appalled by what they regard as Elon Musk’s attempts to slash the federal budget by eliminating federal agencies and laying off bureaucrats might reconsider. If the new administration’s efforts to reduce the human population of Washington succeed, this would be to everyone’s advantage.
By opening up more green spaces for rats, they wouldn’t have to be scrambling for food in dumpsters all the time and could chill. Re-locating federal agencies and their hirelings to the boonies might have a similarly beneficent effect.
Sometimes we must take a more expansive, less human-centric, view of these challenges.
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