Last year, Washington, D.C., was named the city with the country's heaviest drinkers. Next, a study ranked the District of Columbia as second in the nation (behind Baltimore) for bed bugs.
Well, not to be outdone, Washington, D.C., has once again made news. This time, D.C. is ranked as the third worst city in the country for rats.
It's totally believable. Anyone who has ridden the Metro knows that this city has its fair share of rats.
According to a new study compiled by RentHop, D.C. had the third-most rat complaints filed in the United States in 2017. The study defines rat "complaints" as any formal complaint filed with the city or animal control for rat infestations. Not all rat complaints end up being formally filed with city governments, meaning that these statistics likely under-represent the problems.
Chicago, Illinois, led the study with 50,963 rat complaints in 2017. New York City came in second, with a total of 19,152 complaints in 2017. Washington, D.C., took "bronze" after 5,036 reports were filed for rat infestations.
However, when you account for the cities' population size and normalize the statistics, Washington, D.C., actually has the second-most rat complaints per capita. Per hundred thousand residents in the District, there were 725.68 rat complaints. That is more than three times as many as New York!
City officials, however, are telling a different story. While there was a sharp increase in filed rat complaints in Washington, D.C., last year, Gerard Brown, who serves as the program manager of the D.C. Department of Health’s rodent control division, explained that roughly half of all rodent complaints last year did not turn up evidence of rat infestation. Still, the Department of Health is devoting more resources this year to try out a new strategy. Officials plan on using a specially designed chemical to sterilize many of the city's rats.
"[The chemical’s] kind of sweet," Brown explained, "and when the rats drink it, they get sterilized.”
While health officials will never be able to sterilize all of D.C.'s rats, the hope is that they can make a dent by preventing the rodents from breeding.
But even with all of these new pest control measures, residents are still the first line of defense against the rodents. "Usually when you have a rat problem, it’s human behavior that causes it," Brown says.
The city is also trying to raise awareness and remind residents and businesses to keep a lid on their trash cans and dumpsters. RentHop also found a correlation nationwide between the number of rat complaints in a neighborhood and the number of dog poop complaints as well.
