Rats Have Not Changed. We Have.
Sheltering in place produced a “natural experiment” for urban wildlife.
After Chicago’s stores and restaurants shut down in March, Rebecca Fyffe, the director of research at a pest-control company, went on one of her usual evening “rat safaris.” Her employer, Landmark Pest Management, services many of the city’s high-end, Michelin-rated restaurants, which had been forced to close hastily, dumping piles of produce. Beside a dumpster near one such restaurant, Fyffe came across cases of past-prime avocados. “I saw this box of avocados just teeming with rats,” she says. As the city’s humans retreated home to avoid the coronavirus, its rats got “one big, final buffet.”
Then, however, came the famine.
