Word: ratted
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Michael Mills, a veteran health inspector in New York City, helps create a map of the city you won't find in any guidebook: a rat map. That's right, a map of the New York neighborhoods that rodent populations call home...
...city's rat map was first introduced a year ago, with an intensive pilot program in the Bronx. Mills and other inspectors scoured the streets, building by building, cataloging rat hot spots - places that show so-called active rat signs, such as lived-in burrows, fresh droppings, telltale gnaw marks on plastic garbage bags - in an effort to target rodent-control measures more effectively. That geocoding information was entered into each inspector's handheld indexing computer and aggregated with similar data from all across the borough. (See the top 10 animal stories...
Today, rodent complaints by residents from all over New York are electronically pinpointed on the city's computerized rat map, which allows inspectors to track complaints and hot spots over time and determine how well rat-control efforts are working. The results, after just one year, should be music to the ears of most New Yorkers: when the pilot study began in the Bronx, inspectors found active rat signs on 3,100 of the borough's 39,000 properties. Preliminary results now show that 1,250 of those properties are rat-free. That's a 40% drop-off in infestations...
Without that initiative, the rat numbers would be expected to stay the same or even go up, says Dan Kass, an assistant commissioner in the city's department of health and mental hygiene...
...only species of rat (of the four-legged variety, anyway) that lives in New York City is the Rattus norvegicus, also known as the Norway rat or the brown rat. Nobody knows exactly how many live here, but everyone agrees that the population has exploded in recent years - thanks to warmer winters, ever more wasteful food habits and, in part, the city's crippling fiscal problems in the 1970s...