2 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
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Traps. Poison. Birth control. Dry ice.
And now, what city officials are touting
as a high-tech solution: drowning.
New York has attempted to eradicate
its teeming rat population for 355 years
and counting. On Thursday, the latest
tactic in the Sisyphean effort was un-
veiled, with great fanfare, by Eric Ad-
ams, the Brooklyn borough president.
It was, in effect, a bucket that would
lure the rodents and send them plunging
to their deaths in a mysterious vinegary
concoction. The toxic potion, according
to its maker, Rat Trap Inc., prevents
them from rotting too quickly and emit-
ting a stink.
A dozen reporters were gathered
around Mr. Adams when he gleefully
displayed a plastic bin containing blobs
of rat floating around in a mouse-gray
stew; it was a ghastly spectacle and the
odor was stomach-churning.
“Sometimes you need to see for your-
selves to get the shock effect,” Mr. Ad-
ams said.
“Are you serious?” said one of the re-
porters, while another turned his face
away. “That’s disgusting.”
Mr. Adams said he wants to install the
newfangled traps, which cost between
$300 and $400, in several locations in
Brooklyn. If successful, he said, he
would look to expand the method city-
wide.
The pilot program has already hit one
snag. Mr. Adams’s office initially placed
five boxes in and around Brooklyn Bor-
ough Hall, but one was disabled by a
very large rat. “It was so big it broke the
spring mechanism in the box, so that it
was no longer functioning,” said Jonah
Allon, Mr. Adams's spokesman.
Though New York’s “War on Rats” is
as old as the city itself, the methods keep
changing.
Back in 1865, an exasperated reporter
for The New York Times wrote that
“traps are of no use whatsoever,” and
that the solution would be to “engage a
Pied Piper to charm the vermin to their
destruction.”
More recently, after the Rudolph Giu-
liani administration escalated the anti-
rat campaign in the late 1990s — using
three kinds of rat poison — an extermi-
nator in Manhattan and Brooklyn told
The Times that the rodent population
had been “astronomical for the last twoyears,” and added: “They are healthier
than ever. You see them all bloated, ei-
ther fat or pregnant.”
There was an attempt at rat birth con-
trol, first tested in 2011 and then rolled
out by the Department of Health as a pi-
lot program in 2017; it is still used in
parts of the city.
Then the Metropolitan Transporta-
tion Authority ran a six-month, $1 mil-
lion trial of the “fertility management
bait” in subways in 2013, and said in 2017
that it would expand to additional sta-
tions following “promising results.” But
rodent and pest control experts said that
while the plan may have slowed down
breeding somewhat, it has not had a
quantifiable effect.
In 2017, the Bill de Blasio administra-tion offered a $32 million plan, part of
which involved killing rats by stuffing
their burrows with dry ice, a method ap-
proved by the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency (In one Chinatown park,
packing burrows with dry ice resulted in
the deaths of 1,200 rats — suffocated by
the release of carbon dioxide — and a re-
duction of rat burrows to two from 60,
officials said.)
That plan is generally effective, said
Jason Munshi-South, a professor of biol-
ogy at Fordham University who has
studied New York City’s rats. But it re-
quires a lot of labor and energy.
In unveiling his new rat trap, Mr. Ad-
ams — who held a so-called Rat Summit
last year — went on a tirade against Mr.
de Blasio’s 2017 plan, which included us-ing mint-scented, rat-repelling garbage
bags that, by many accounts, do not
seem to work. He showed a video of ro-
dents crawling inside one of the bags.
“None of these have noticeable re-
sults,” said Professor Munshi-South,
who said he had seen rats feeding from
Mint-X bags. “The day-to-day experi-
ence of people in the city is that rats are
a problem, and it’s getting worse.”
Professor Munshi-South described
Mr. Adams’s solution as a “dunk tank at
a carnival where the rat falls in and
drowns.” Still, he added, “It’s beneficial
in that you’re not spreading poison.”
But he said it will ultimately prove fu-
tile until New York solves underlying is-
sues like proper garbage etiquette. Even
if 90 percent of the city’s rats were killed,the survivors could potentially breed
faster because of less competition for
food, he said.
“You may be harvesting rats like
grains,” he said.
Mr. Adams did say that the city’s hu-
man residents bear much of the respon-
sibility for curbing the rat population.
“New Yorkers need to understand
that they have a role in stopping this,” he
said. “I don’t believe we have built in a
right culture of how to dispose of our
garbage. People have not made the con-
nection between what your neighbors
are doing with their garbage and how
this feeds the problem.”
A news release for the event said that
Mr. Adams would “display 90 rats
caught during new pilot program,” but
there were only about 20 in the new trap.
Rat sightings reported to the city’s 311
hotline have soared nearly 38 percent, to
17,353 last year, up from 12,617 in 2014,
according to an analysis of city data by
OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit watch-
dog group, and The Times. In the same
period, the number of times that city
health inspections found active signs of
rats nearly doubled.
As the rats in New York City have
swelled in numbers and physical size, so
has the business for pest control.
“It’s gross, but it’s helping people,” Pe-
ter Golia, who runs Rat Trap Distribu-
tion, said as he held aloft a bag of rat car-
casses. “If you put a dead rat in a
garbage with poison, it’s degrading into
the ground and contaminating the soil.”
Still, he was coy about the trap’s pre-
cise rodent-killing recipe, calling it “an
all-natural solution.”
“It’s an alcohol, oil and vinegar-based
solution,” he said vaguely, adding: “It’s
organic!”
“You could actually drink that and
you probably wouldn’t die,” he said.
“Well, maybe a little sick.”New and unsavory weapon against an old enemy: The rat
In New York, the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, showed the rat trap that is
supposed to lure rodents and send them plunging into a vinegary concoction.Removing the rat trap’s lid. One of the test traps has already been disabled by a very
large rat. “It was so big it broke the spring mechanism,” said Mr. Adams’s spokesman.PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN TAGGART FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESNew York has fought
this war for 355 years;
the rodents are still there
BY KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA
jected that those conditions might call
into question their stewardship of the
artifacts, many of which were collected
during the era of European imperialism.
“We are not saying we are living in a
perfect world,” Lars-Christian Koch, a
senior official overseeing the Ethnolog-
ical Museum, said in an interview. But,
he added, “We definitely know what we
are doing and how to take care of the ob-
jects.”
“We have our difficulties,” Professor
Koch said, “but we are opening up the
whole situation and we are being trans-
parent.”
Berlin’s state museums returned nine
artifacts to indigenous groups in Alaska
last year, and Professor Koch and others
pointed to an agreement signed by Ger-
many’s culture authorities in March that
established guidelines for returning ob-
jects taken from former colonies. “There
are international standards for storage
facilities and we know that in some mu-
seums in Africa and Asia, you don’t have
these standards,” Professor Koch said.
“That’s why some of our colleagues are
asking us from these countries to get
some way of capacity-building over
there.”
Sindika Dokolo, a Congolese art col-
lector who runs a foundation that has or-
ganized the return of artifacts to Congo
and Angola, said it was true that “a
whole generation” of museum profes-
sionals, like curators and conservation-
ists, needed to be trained “in most of the
African countries.” But while that new
generation was being trained, he said, it
is European museums’ responsibility to
make sure African audiences had access
to the artifacts in their possession.
Institutions should say to themselves,
“I need to find ways to make this very
important part of their cultural history
and identity accessible to this popula-
tion. How do I make that happen?” Mr.
Dokolo said.
It is up to them to create the condi-
tions that would let African artifacts
“play their role where they need to be
right now, in Africa,” he added.
If Germany wants to work on capaci-
ty-building in museums, it might con-
sider starting closer to home, said An-
dreas Schlothauer, the editor of the cul-
tural journal Art and Context. He said, in
some ways, it is German museums that
are often out of step with international
norms.
While the Ethnological Museum is
funded by the federal government, most
museums in Germany are funded by lo-
cal governments that prefer to invest in
exhibitions over the unseen labor of
preservation, Mr. Schlothauer said.
That dynamic has led many of them to
overlook innovations, like digital inven-
tories, that museums in other countries
embraced years ago, he said.
In interviews, curators at the Ethno-
logical Museum said some collections
still use card catalogs from the 1960s, or
even handwritten 19th-century ledgers.
“They have enough money to hold the
status quo, to keep it,” Mr. Schlothauer
said, “but not to make an effort like the
U.S. did in the 1990s with a process of
digitalization and inventory and pho-
tographing every object.”
“You have the same work in the
Netherlands, and in Scandinavia and in
France,” he added. “But in Germany we
are behind.”
German museums have been slow to
embrace technology in other ways too,
he said. As an anthropologist who stud-
ies South American feather works, Mr.
Schlothauer said it was not unusual to
stumble across moths or larvae mixed
in with objects in the wooden storage
cases of German depots.
“I have worked in Gothenburg and
Stockholm and Amsterdam, and they
have a storage room for feathers that
are frozen,” he said. “That is the best
condition.”
Officials at the Ethnological Museum
blamed aging buildings for many of
their problems. The ceilings sometimes
leak and researchers wear protective
gear because of toxic dust caused by
chemical treatments used on artifacts in
decades past.
Dirk Heisig, who trains museum pro-
fessionals and has researched condi-
tions at institutions in northwest Ger-
many, said that some museum directors
had a Darwinian approach to their col-
lections. “You put an object in the depot
for 10 or 20 years, and you look to see if it
has survived the depot situation,” he
said. “If so, it goes to the museum.”
A recent tour of two Ethnological Mu-
seum depots housing artifacts from
Southeast Asia and Oceania revealed an
uneven approach to storage. The mu-
seum said the Africa collection depot,
which was the focus of the Süddeutsche
Zeitung investigation, was closed so a
fire protection system could be in-stalled. “This was modern in the 1970s,”
Dorothea Deterts, a curator, said, point-
ing to a metal case in the Oceania col-
lection storage depot that was packed
with what she said were too many wood
carvings. “It is not modern nowadays, of
course, but it is better than other rooms
we have here.”Some of the problems at the Ethnolog-
ical Museum are unique and reflect the
troubled history of Berlin. Chief among
them is a lingering sense of disorganiza-
tion that dates to World War II, when
some of its records were destroyed by
Allied bombing and roughly 55,000 arti-
facts were taken to the Soviet Union as
spoils of war.
Those artifacts were later brought to
East Germany, where some grew mold
in dank storage rooms while others
cracked or broke into pieces owing to
rough handling, Professor Koch said.
The casualties included clay drums
from South Asia that now lie in “hun-
dreds of pieces,” he said.
When Germany was reunified, theEthnological Museum was reunified too.
But like the rest of the country, the rein-
tegration of its collection was an uneven
process. That has left some curators not
entirely certain of what they have.
There are many reasons for that.
Some returned objects were incorrectly
identified, like a group of West African
ancestral figures that were mistaken for
tools, said Jonathan Fine, a curator in
the Africa collection.
Roughly 2,000 of the returned objects
could not be identified because they lost
tags or had been damaged, Professor
Koch said.
They have sat for years in storage in
over 100 boxes.
Museum officials said they were digi-tizing their entire collection to build an
online database as part of the restitution
guidelines adopted earlier this year. As
objects are digitized, they will also be
cleansed of toxic dust. But that work is
going slowly.
Mr. Della, the postcolonial activist,
said accounts of damaged objects and
confusion in the depots called into ques-
tion the museum’s ability to repatriate
artifacts if their original countries ask
for their return.
“If Germany is serious about return-
ing objects to their original countries it
has to take care of them and have them
in some order,” he said. “An object that
has been lost or destroyed cannot be re-
turned.”Safeguarding African culture
MUSEUM, FROM PAGE 1
Guardian figures that once stood at the entrances of houses in Taiwan are stored at the Ethnological Museum.ANDREAS MEICHSNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESA storage depot at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, which closed to the public in 2017
to prepare for a move to its new home, the Humboldt Forum.ANDREAS MEICHSNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESThe Humboldt Forum under construction in Berlin. The new museum will bring the
collections of several existing museums in the city together under one roof.JENS KALAENE/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES“We have our difficulties,” said Lars-
Christian Koch, a museum official.ANDREAS MEICHSNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES